Caught on camera: Policeman takes 'best ever shots of big cat' on railway line

Is it a pooch? Is it a pet?

No, it's a big cat, according to a policeman who took this footage of a mysterious black creature.

Military policeman Chris Swallow initially thought he was looking at a labrador crossing railway tracks.

But on closer inspection he said he became convinced he had seen one of the mysterious big cats which reportedly roam the UK.

'The animal wasn't moving the way I expected a dog to. It was then I realised that what I was seeing was a big cat,' Pc Swallow said, adding that he was 'stunned' by what he saw.
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'You can tell from the size of the track that it is much larger than a house cat.'

The animal is just the latest in a long line of sightings of big cats in the UK - Cath Palug reportedly roamed Anglesey in the Middle Ages and sightings of the Beast of Bodmin have been regularly reported since the early 1990s.

Most wild cat sightings have been assumed to be panthers, with a handful of reports assumed to be the lynx - a big cat once native in this country.

Their existence in the wild has been accredited to a range of sources, from escaped zoo and circus animals to a mass release in the 1970s after the enforcement of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act.