I RECEIVED photos of seven different suspected big cat kills – three different species of deer, a lamb and a swan – from around Suffolk. The photos were provided by the same witness, who found these kill sites over the past five years. I interviewed the witness in January 2025.
We agreed to be vague about the exact location of one of these possible big cat kills. I name the others. Two of the kills, the swan and the muntjac deer with its back half missing, were in the same village.
The witness said that in his village he’d also noticed a pattern of lambs going missing, and putting this down to lambs dying of “misadventure” after wandering into ditches, only to find a lamb skull in the local woods later.
Three photos of a fallow deer found in March 2023 in the “Wickham Market area.” It appeared suddenly, “tucked under a tree… tucked away next to a game trail” in woods bordering a river. The witness said there was signs of something returning to the corpse later to carefully lick flesh of its head and ribs.
This muntjac was found in the Letheringham area in December 2020, it had been “dragged down a bank.”
The remains of a swan, “not much of it left, licked off flesh” was found in Letheringham, the same village as the muntjac above, at around the same time (early December
Around the village of Hoo, in the open near a wood, this muntjac was found in January 2023. It was just bones and a “bag of skin,” the way the flesh was removed was neat and “surgical”. The ground around it had been flattened, there was blood around it.
Yet another suspected big cat kill, this one a fallow deer from the Saxted area, this one a fallow deer. It was on “fairly open ground, near a farm.” It was basically a skeleton with the skin stripped off, there was still fur on only one leg.
This one is a red deer yearling, found in Helmingham on Boxing Day 2023, also in the Wickham Market area. The witness has also heard two reports of a deer found up a tree from the same location. (I heard secondhand reports about a deer found up a tree in the same place back in 2015, with rumours that someone had kept the bones, but my investigations drew a blank.)
The young red deer was a fresh kill when it was found. Its lips and ears had been “licked clean”. Its front legs had been removed, there were signs of puncture wounds on it, there was blood on the ground. The witness reported that the local red deer herd was “very vigilant when I investigated.” The witness has also noticed a “strong cat urine smell” in the local woods, which his dog refuses to enter.
Finally, the witness gave me this photo of another local likely big cat kill, he asked me not to name the location. This is a recently shorn lamb, found on 27 November 2024. It had its “middle bitten out”, with what looked like claw or tooth marks on it. A vet came to the scene and “the authorities (were) called…then everything went quiet.” Vet came and the “authorities called”, then “everything went quiet”. According to the witness, the vet said the lamb had been “suffocated”, via an attack on its windpipe or nose.