Richard Bath at large: Big cat hunter of Kilmacolm swears it isn't all a big game

Published on Saturday 1 August 2009 21:26

'I'M not mad you know. Some folk think I am, but I'm not. I've got nothing to prove to anybody, but I know what I saw. Seeing that big cat changed my life."

Sandy Smith is a down to earth sort of fella. A landscaper who works out of the douce Renfrewshire town of Kilmacolm, he exudes the sort of bluff matter-of-factness that you get with men who have worked on the land all their lives. Only there's nothing ordinary about this particular tubby 58-year-old. Meet one of Scotland's growing band of Big Cat Hunters.

Smith's journey to becoming a single issue obsessive began four years ago when Caroline Nish, a regular client, buttonholed him as he was working on her garden. "She came rushing out saying that she'd seen a big cat again," he remembers. "I just laughed at her. She said it was a big, big cat and complained that she'd seen it before but that no-one would believe her.

"I didn't think anything more of it, but soon afterwards I was finishing up a job at the back of Kilmacolm and saw something moving among the silver birches. At first I thought it was a child, but when it climbed up into a tree it was jet black and you could see that it couldn't be anything but a big cat. Both my son Alan and our apprentice Davie Thomson saw it."

I look over to his son Alan, who's sitting in the front of their van wearing the family firm's overalls. It would be difficult to imagine a less flaky 30-year-old. "Yeah it's true," he says. "We all saw it, he's not making it up."

Smith and men like the Scottish Big Cat Society's Mark Fraser and George Redpath, the undisputed doyens of the Scottish big cat hunting community, have been given a fillip by the mobile phone camera footage captured by Faslane dog handler Chris Swallow on a railway track near Helensburgh, which seemed to show a big cat. It may have been grainy and accompanied by the sound of Swallow's panting after he had to run back to get his mobile, but the railway tracks give a clear scale which suggests that the animal was about four feet long. The Labrador-sized star of the impromptu filmshoot also seemed to have a feline gait and a long, curled tail quite unlike that of any dog.

That spectacular footage came the week after another incident in which a horse near Sundrum Holiday Park in Coylton, Ayrshire – a noted big cat sighting hotspot – was badly injured by what a vet concluded was a wild animal, possibly a puma. The two sightings have further consolidated the rock-solid belief of those like Smith who have no doubt that Scotland is home to big cats. Indeed, between 2000 and 2006, 185 members of the public contacted the police to say they had seen a big cat, with Buchan, Fife and Ayrshire the hotspots.

Not that everyone is convinced. Dr Andrew Kitchener, the curator of birds and mammals at the National Museums of Scotland, is famously sceptical. Where, he asks, is the evidence?

He has a point. Swallow's footage may be tantalising, but it is not proof. A footprint found in Balbirnie in Fife in 2006 was positively identified as that of an 18-month-old black leopard, and Forest Rangers carrying out a deer study in the Forest of Dean on the English-Welsh border have confirmed that their thermal imaging cameras captured shots of two different big cats. There was even a puma caught at Cannich near Inverness in 1980, but the fact that "Felicity" was so tame and well-fed soon led to the conclusion that she was a domesticated big cat that had been recently released.

"There are two types of people: those who haven't seen a big cat and think I'm a screwball, and then there are those who've seen one and know that I'm not mad," says Smith. "Seeing is believing. My wife used to think I was bonkers, but then she was with me when we saw one up on the Houston Road and chased it. You could see the gorse bushes move as it moved through them. She doesn't laugh at me any more and has stopped calling me an idiot. She's a believer."

Many believers have stopped talking in public for fear of ridicule. Doris Moore from the Aberdeenshire village of Insch, who says she was bitten by a big cat in 2002, remains the only person to claim to have been attacked by a big cat but she is so fed up at been labelled a crank she now refuses to discuss the case.

They know that they now need the golden bullet: the capture, carcass or clear photo that would leave no room for doubt. The lack of such proof isn't down to a lack of effort on Smith's part. He regularly goes out armed with cameras and telescopes fitted with night sights and triggers, has recorded a tape of distressed animal sounds intended to lure a big cat, and has even gone as far as to try a range of bait and smells that might appeal (catnip, he says, doesn't work). He tried buying a stun gun for protection, but after the police knocked that idea on the head he has to make do with an airhorn to keep the beasties at bay.

Not that Smith spends his evenings and weekends looking for big cats around Kilmacolm. There hasn't been a sighting locally for years. Or, at least, not a credible sighting: there are, says Smith, "hundreds of attention-seeking idiots who say they've seen big cats when they haven't."

Smith reckons a big cat can live off a pheasant or rabbit a day, even if it's roadkill, and that the explosion in deer numbers has provided a rich source of food. He is convinced that nearby Muirshiel Country Park, 108 square miles of largely uninhabited moor that stretches from Lochwinnoch in Renfrewshire to the Ayrshire coast, is a haven for the cats. He even claims to have seen deer carcasses with puncture marks on the neck, says he found a deer carcass in a tree, swears he has come across sheep carcasses with their intestines ripped out ("big cats love the intestines, it's like caviar to them"). But it's his claim to have seen big cats on an MoD base which he won't identify (but which I quickly surmise to be Bishopton, across the Firth of Clyde from the Dumbarton Rock), which is the most fascinating. "Mark Fraser and I were called in by the MoD after they had reports of big cats on the base," he says, "and we sat there for hours. Then, just as we were leaving we saw one 50 yards ahead, which took two bounds and cleared the road and disappeared."

In a Roswell-esque moment, Smith even claims that the MoD actually have a crystal clear video footage of a black panther with her cubs on their land. Can it really be that that no-one ever seems to have their camera ready despite the ubiquity of mobile phones with good cameras, I ask.

"Look, this is no Loch Ness Monster, no Big Foot," he says. "I know they're there, and it's only a matter of time until the doubters have to eat their words. Then no-one will call me a nutcase."

Until then…