Big Cat with no attitude

WITNESS; Richard D North still believes in the Beast of Bodmin Moor

The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food announced yesterday not merely that it couldn't identify the mystery Big Cat that is rampaging on Bodmin Moor. It said there was no evidence of any such animal. Nothing. Zero. Zilch.

Casts of paws, videos of sightings, forensic examination of supposed victims: all are evidence that the rough moorland human mind is susceptible and has been gulled. Are these not the same depressive country types who commit suicide in droves, so borne under are they by the rural idyll?

Even Rosemary Rhodes, a landowner from Ninestones on Bolventor and a cheerful type, commented: "Everybody will think we have been suffering some kind of mass hallucination in this part of Cornwall."

Maff says it has no evidence of big-cat predation on moorland farms, and I believe it. Lazy farmers are always blaming some animal or other for the losses of lambs. The possibility of adding this new beast to the long list of their troubles must have delighted shepherds.

Anyway, we have non-agricultural evidence that this Big Cat has refined and exceptional tastes. It has not, so far, eaten a jogger. This contradicts American experience which tells us that any normal big cat - a well-adjusted mountain lion, say - regards men and women in fluoresent tracksuits as meat on a stick.

Rosemary Rhodes fears that her Big Cat's first victim will be a person, and that Maff will then be able to wash its hands of the issue and hand it over to the Home Office. The animal will then, of course, immediately be denied welfare of any sort, on the grounds of its being an illegal immigrant.

Maff has had to deal withsome ghastly and grisly cases over the past decade. It has fielded ministers stiff-arming their children into eating hamburgers to prove that BSE could not possibly get into junk food (with luck, it's right). It cheerfully told punters that Chernobyl's fallout would be gone in a few weeks (the radiation hung about in sheep for years - not that it mattered much, granted that sheep, like the rest of us, fairly hum with isotopes).

The Ministry will probably shortly say not merely that sheep farmers are not being predated by the big cat, but also that they have fantasised their supposed sufferings from organophosphate sheepdips. Now that is a serious matter, but it, too, hinges on whether farmers do or do not whip themselves into a state of hysteria about nothing much at all.

All these controversies have trained Maff in the art of dealing with the overheated imaginings and anxieties of a population that is overfed and under-exercised, and therefore given to vaporising and hyperventilating.

But on the cat issue, Maff knew it had to strain every sinew to keep people calm, and it could do so only by systematic disinformation. Over a quiet after-hours whiskey, the minister has told me all. The two-man investigative team did indeed discover evidence of a large animal, but its nature was so weird and threatening that it became imperative to insist that it did not exist. The beast is not a feral puss on steroids, nor an escapee panther from a zoo. Most likely, it is a mutant feline from another galaxy. The intruder has shocked the Ministry by finding nourishment and pleasure in Linda McCartney's vegetarian sausages.

This answers the mystery of how the beast sustained itself: it is a vegetarian and a desperate one. Linda's sausages are freely available in dustbins everywhere.

The Ministry's many rehearsals of reassurance may, however, have blunted the public's faith. Certainly Paul Tyler, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Cornwall, is not taking the bromide lying down: "If the Sherlock Holmes team from the Ministry think they have dispelled the mystery, they have another think coming. They have only deepened it." Quite.