A CATSPIRACY?
Truth can indeed be stranger than fiction and the stock photo of a lynx I found didn’t upload, but this one from Unsplash did.
In the UK we’ve had a plethora of rather silly stories about the Princess of Wales lately though in my opinion the powers that be could have handled the matter from which the speculation arose better. A video popped up in my YouTube feed about a “Katespiracy”. I haven’t watched the video but I liked the play on words.
My mind sometimes engages in lateral thinking so I went from “Katespiracy” to “Catspiracy”. What I thought of next was/is more a rumour than a full-blown conspiracy theory. From time to time in the UK there are reports of big cats such as lynxes and pumas being seen. Most are likely mistaken sightings but I’ve heard a suggestion that people may have tried keeping big cats as pets and found them harder to handle than envisaged. In the UK a licence is needed to keep a big cat (in the sense of a lion, cheetah — not a large domestic cat) as a pet and the idea has been put forward that folk who kept such cats without a licence could have released them into the wild. This does seem a little plausible though as pointed out in an article I found while researching this subject there’s a lack of scatological evidence and an absence of unexplained attacks on sheep. *
My memory kept nagging me about an event I’d heard of a number of years ago in London. Google helped me this time — indeed there had been a case of a lynx being captured in Cricklewood, north London in the early 2000s. ** Do You Remember The Beast Of Barnet? | Londonist I recommend reading the article I’ve referred as it’s well written. The story is that there had been sightings of a large cat in that part of London for a while but when a lady reported seeing a lynx in 2001 the authorities were sceptical. A couple of policemen investigated the matter and yay, verily, there was a lynx seated on a fence. A group of suitable people was assembled to round up the lynx though they had to give quite a chase when a shot from a tranquiliser gun didn’t go as anticipated. In due course the lynx was caught and taken to London Zoo where she was discovered to be female and named Lara — “Lara the Lynx” has a ring to it.
I’m glad Lara had a happy ending. There have been cases where animals who have escaped from zoos have been summarily shot fatally. London Zoo put out feelers to find Lara a mate and she was transferred to a zoo in France where she got to live out the rest of her natural life and experience the joys of motherhood.
Dear readers, do you know of any “catspiracy”? The tale of Lara the Lynx shows that sometimes, like the old saying, truth is indeed “stranger than fiction”.
* Claims of Big Cats in The UK Keep Cropping Up. So What’s The Truth? : ScienceAlert by Eril Droge 29 August 2023
** Do You Remember The Beast Of Barnet? | Londonist by Harry Rosehill (can’t see original date of article but website says last upated 04 October 2017)
