The recently recorded Big Cat Coversations podcast, Episode 139, is a Suffolk special titled “Suffolk born and bred – the people and the panthers”. It’s well worth a listen. It’s linked from here.
In this episode, released at the end of April 2026, Big Cat Conversations host Rick Minter, ecologist at Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, interviews Paul, a retired forester, about his multiple big cat sightings over the years. I interviewed Paul myself back in 2016, testimony from Paul features in Mystery Animals of Suffolk, along with photos of his collection of fossil sea urchins he’s found in Suffolk over the years and the coypu skull he found in a hedge locally, a few years after coypus were declared eradicated in England. Paul, who’s based in Framlingham, planted thousands of trees to help the landscape recover from the devastation of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, these are now fully grown.
Rick mentions in the podcast a recent meeting about big cats in Eye, Suffolk to which Paul was invited – he wasn’t able to attend. Many other big cat investigators from the East of England and beyond, including myself, attended the meeting, but I did so on the understanding that its findings and the full names of those present were not for publication.
I finally got to meet Rick at the Eye meeting in person, as well as several witnesses who I’d only even spoken to by phone. Regrettably, I had to leave meeting early, as the person I’d arranged to give me a lift to Dunwich was taken ill. Thanks to John’s mum for driving me to Framlingham and thanks to my brother Tom for coming to pick me up from the Castle pub there just before closing time!
Paul relates in Big Cat Conversatons back in the 1980s one of the first rumours going round about Suffolk big cats. He was warned by colleagues of big cats in Nacton Woods. He also described a 1980s big cat encounter in Debenham, in which he and his wife in a car got a good look up close at at big cat walking in a rural lane a mile and a half from the village. Soon afterwards he talked to a Debenham-based off-duty policeman who told him the “Debenham Lion” had just been seen several times within days
When I interviewed Paul, he described the animal he saw as like a small lion with tufted ears, it became known as “the Debenham Lion.” At the time I – and others – came to the conclusion that the animal was a misidentied ginger Maine Coon cat. In the 1980s this breed was still very rare in the UK and so easy to misidentify.
In his testimony to Rick, though, Paul was much more convinced that what he had seen was a lynx, it was a more “brownish” with “grey in it as well”, also with white markings. (Although Paul described the animal he saw in the 1980s as having a “medium”-sized tail.) Rick suggested that the way the animal moved, as if still a bit dazed, disoriented and unused to its environment, could be consistent with an animal that had just been “dumped” – released into the wild. The fact that it was seen frequently within a short time is also suggestive of a big cat new to the wild. We know there was a lot of dumping of big cats going on in the 1980s.
As for the name The Debenham Lion, I later learnt that this was the name of the local pub, which closed down not long after Paul’s encounter. It’s likely that the local mystery big cat was named after the local pub rather than because of its appearance.
Another encounter that Paul described to Rick (he didn’t describe it our interview back in 2016) was seeing the face of a black cat by the side of a road, looking at him through the bracken. This was around 2002-2003 on the A12 at Friday Street, a turn of the A12 road just south of Saxmundham.
Also described by Paul was a “light brown” big cat (a puma?) seen in the mid-noughties, at dusk, on the Little Glemham Estate. It was also seen by its then co-owner. It jumped a four-foot fence. Others on the estate reported a big cat sighting to the estate’s owners soon after.
Paul additionally described a local beef cattle farmer around 2022 losing some cows – vets became involved and “they had to bring a shooter in.” Some of the cows had pushed through three hedges to get away from something and were found two to three miles away, and they were “really, really spooked.” Domestic cats occasional go missing from the town of Framlingham, near where he lives, he adds.
He also found an animal so “eaten out” that he couldn’t tell what animal it was, and an “eaten out” muntjac at Lackford Lakes that was just skin and bone, with the skin rolled back, even its tongue had been eaten, all its organs had gone. He described in around 1990 finding 18-inch rods that had corkscrew-type ends to drive them into the ground, to secure a wire snare (when snares of this type were still legal.) Something had pulled these rods out of the ground. The location was hidden deep in bracken in a 200-acre woodland. There were signs of something big “rolling around” as if trying to free itself, with a circle of grass or bracken knocked down.
Paul also described himself and a classmate at primary school being “peed on by a lion” on a school trip to London Zoo after they had both stuck out their tongues at him. (This was back in the days when visitors saw the lions at London Zoo through bars, not the thick glasss the lion enclosure has today.) A friend of Paul’s had a sighting of a big cat in Norfolk back in 1966, according to Paul.
Rick ended the interview by announcing that John (surname known to me) who organised the recent meeting in Eye is now setting up a camera wall – a line of about 30 trail cams – at a nature reserve field on a farm somewhere in Suffolk, to gather evidence of big cats. Watch this space!