The Other Loch Ness Monster
Is a big cat stalking the shores of the Scottish lake?
While Nessie, the legendary and entirely benign Loch Ness monster, has never been known to eat anything or anyone, people around the shores of the famous Scottish lake are worried that another unseen animal may be stalking their homes.
Local police have been asked to keep an eye out for a big cat who, according to some people, has been seen prowling the hills and homes that surround the lake.
Katrina Wallace is one mother who’s afraid for her kids. Her husband Jim told her he’d glimpsed the cat outside their home one night. “We have two black Labradors, and he thought it was one of those” she said. “But then we realized they were inside.”
Wallace said one of the dogs was then attacked by an animal large enough to try to haul him away. “The vet said it could only get an injury like that if it had been dragged,” she said.
Outdoor cats in Britain are often referred to as moggies, so the uninvited visitor quickly gained the title of the Loch Ness Mogster.
People have been reporting sightings of big cats – known as ABCs (Alien Big Cats) – roaming the British countryside for years. They’re said to look like panthers or mountain lions, neither of which are part of U.K. wildlife.
Two years ago, a police dog handler captured this video from his backyard in Scotland:
Home video from police officer Chris Swallow
“We have regular sightings reported every year of large black cats,” said Shaun Stevens, a researcher with the Big Cats in Britain group, who has examined the video. “We get a sighting practically every day.”
Stevens believes the cats could be a hybrid species or an entirely new species. “Knowing that the width of the rail tracks in Chris’s video is 4ft 8.5in, the animal photographed by him is clearly in excess of four feet and as such is certainly not a domestic cat.”
In 1988, the Ministry of Agriculture send in the Royal Marines to carry out a full-scale search for the rumored Beast of Exmoor (near the home of Sherlock Holmes’s Hound of the Baskervilles) after a spike in reports of mysterious killings of farm animals. Several Marines claimed to have seen the cat fleetingly, but no big cat was ever found, and the Ministry concluded that reports of the Beast were simply mass hysteria.
What do you say? Do you think that these legendary creatures, including the Yeti and Bigfoot and maybe even the Loch Ness Monster, exist? Let us know in a comment below or on Facebook.