What’s Welsh for chupacabra? Dog’s Death Puts Wales On Alert for Big Cats:
The fear of big cats has lately reached nearly hysterical proportions in Wales — and not just among people who also believe in UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster. Provoked by the killing of a whippet owned by a former dog-show judge, police mounted a round-the-clock stakeout to find the leopard-like cat that, according to a witness, tore the dog apart on a Sunday evening last month.
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The police sent in a van normally used for SWAT raids. “These guns have a two-mile kill range,” says officer Julian Jenkins, displaying two sniper rifles locked in the vehicle. Puma scent was sprinkled in the area to lure the creature back from the adjacent woods. A police helicopter was scrambled after another reported a sighting, but advanced thermal-imaging equipment (“It can spot a rabbit at night from 1,000 feet in the air,” says a police spokesman.) spotted only farm animals.
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Yet despite all the precautions, police say there has never been indisputable photographic evidence that big cats actually exist in these parts. Although there have been some 170 reported sightings in Wales since 1994, the Welsh Assembly’s rural-affairs minister, Michael German, says that “nobody’s found one yet, not even a dead one.”