Felid tales: Big cats and Britain's weird, wilding countrysides

O'Mahony, Kieran ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2227-2344 and Smith, Thomas Aneurin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7221-1868 2026. Felid tales: Big cats and Britain's weird, wilding countrysides. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 51 (4) , e70094. 10.1111/tran.70094

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Abstract

This paper examines the strange, affective and politically charged presence of big cats—black leopards, pumas, lynx or often-unidentified species—in Britain, arguing that their rumoured yet viscerally felt existence offers a generative lens through which to consider multispecies futures. While official investigations have neither confirmed nor disproven their presence, big cats occupy a peculiar space in the public consciousness, improbable yet persistently reported and vividly remembered. Based on research with witnesses and big cat enthusiasts, we explore how fleeting encounters with large felids unfold as a weird ecology of encounter, where embodied and multisensory events unsettle the assumed orderliness of the British countryside. Drawing on spectral, uncanny, weird and ‘new weird’ geographies, this paper argues that big cat encounters are experienced as corporeal, weird intrusions that enchant, disorient and disturb. Ordinary features of the British countryside—footpaths, fields, copses, quarries and railway cuttings—become sites of ontological disturbance, where the familiar turns unexpectedly strange. Such experiences linger as uncanny feline landscapes, reconfiguring how places are navigated and thickened with possibility, their atmospheres knotting with speculative feline ecologies which range from understandings of Britain as ecologically capacious enough to support big cats to visions of an island so depleted it requires landscape-scale transformation. These tensions resonate with current debates surrounding rewilding, species reintroduction, feral ecologies and the shifting cultural politics of rural Britain. Big cat encounters, we argue, are affective and ontological conditions that reorganise how landscapes are sensed and inhabited, exceeding simple questions about evidence or belief. In situating big cats as weird, elusive presences, we show how they expose the instability of Britain's pastoral ideal and invite new ways of imagining multispecies coexistence within the weird, wilding countrysides these encounters open up.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Geography and Planning (GEOPL) Schools > School of Social and Spatial Sciences
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	0020-2754
Date of Acceptance:	28 July 2026
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2026 11:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/190146

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