Another Rare Item of Wild Cat History Found

Yesterday afternoon I had to stop and take a deep breath. I finished work on The Red Paper 2022 Vol. I: Felids earlier this month (the 7th July to be precise). I had tracked down long lost images and reports and the one thing that really niggled at my brain was the fact that a certain wild cat shot and killed in England in the 1920s (there were six killed and in the same wild area) had vanished from a museum where it existed up until the 1980s.

Finding images and taxidermy going back to the early 19th century (my colleague LM does most of the taxidermy discoveries) but failing to find something that existed in a museum until so recently was...annoying.

I spoke to various old naturalists and though their memories are not as great as they used to be they did recall the wild cat in question and seeing it at the museum in question in  the late 1980s. Should I just put it down as a failure or ask the museum to double check and make sure it had not gone to another establishment? I gritted my teeth and asked whether it had been loaned out.

It had. The taxidermy had not even been registered at the museum in the first place which is why there was no record and since the 1990s had resided at another museum on loan...but forgotten).

I know have the photographs thanks to the museum in question and it has been added as an "addenda" at the back of the book. It may not be -there are questions only DNA will be able to answer- pure bred but it seems far more likely that it was part of a remnant population of British wild cats shot into extinction with only one being preserved -the others were simply dumped near to where they had been shot despite the shooters being aware that wild cats were supposedly extinct. The 'fun' of the shooting was what mattered.

As with the many other photographs that have not been seen publicly before (as with those in the Canids volume) there will be no "reveal" -which would make the whole purpose of the works redundant.

British Felid and Canid history has been re-written and that is far from bragging. Just fact.