BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY

NO 56. BIG CATS INDEED… BUT ARE THEY ALIEN?

e were mildly amused a month or two back to read that armed police had been called to deal with a savannah cat. (Attentive readers will have seen the account: FT395:9.) The savannah is an odd, but not that uncommon, hybrid of the African serval and your average household moggin – although given their relative sizes, one’s imagination is stretched to picture the necessary copulatory arrangements. To those of us familiar with the serval, having tooled-up Plods out to deal with its smaller offspring strikes us as what you might call overkill. Not that servals and savannahs are exactly titchy, but they do have lovely smiles, endearingly huge ears and a phenomenal purr; in some parts of Africa they’re kept as pets. And are presumably kept away from small children, for they have a very powerful swipe, which they use to knock fish senseless. None of which is entirely a digression from our subject, because there is a persistent assumption that the big cats – usually called alien big cats – seen padding about the British countryside