The Kintyre Forum

It is interesting to hear on the news this afternoon of the sighting of a 'big cat' in Helensburgh.

This reminds me of a sighting of a 'big cat' we saw while walking over Barr Glenn in the early 90s when we saw a very very large animal which certainly looked too big to be a normal cat and more panther size. Has anyone else saw a big cat in Kintyre?

mrn wrote:It is interesting to hear on the news this afternoon of the sighting of a 'big cat' in Helensburgh.

This reminds me of a sighting of a 'big cat' we saw while walking over Barr Glenn in the early 90s when we saw a very very large animal which certainly looked too big to be a normal cat and more panther size. Has anyone else saw a big cat in Kintyre?

Hi mrn,

There were big cat sightings a few years back....

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=452&p=3382&hilit=big+cat#p3382

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1122&p=9421&hilit=big+cat#p9421

Saw the footage of this on the TV news this evening. It's very clearly just a black domestic cat, albeit a larger than average example.

I've got a short length of railway track in the shed here (don't ask why) and there's no way a panther or other big cat would chooase to walk along it when there is plenty of flat ground immediately adjacent. It's just too narrow for choice.

Other people have pointed to the guage of the track as being diagnostic, at 1.45m. By my reckoning this would put the so called panther at no more than 2ft long (body).

There are people I know in Carradale who have seen the Kintyre Cat, however.

Other people have pointed to the guage of the track as being diagnostic, at 1.45m. By my reckoning this would put the so called panther at no more than 2ft long (body).

If you freeze the video on the bbc website at a bit when the cat's positioned perpendicular to the rail track you can see that it is pretty much as long as the distance between the two rails.. The standard gauge is somewhere in the region of 4'8" so that would make the cat in the video a good bit bigger than two feet long... if it was a pet cat it would get through a fair few packs of whiskas in the average week - but on the plus side you wouldn't get any deer coming in the garden to eat your flowers anymore

Any reports of small children going missing in the Helensburgh area?

Look at the width of the body of the beast, compared to the width of the track.

The track itself is about 4 inches across - the body can't be much wider than this else its legs wouldn't allow it to comfortably walk along the rail, and it wouldn't do so uncomfortably when there was an alternative, such as the clear ground to the right.

This type of fence walking is typical of domestic cats.

I'm fully convinced that there is a medium/large exotic cat living on Kintyre or the immediate Argyll area, but this ain't it.