Wales logs 15 big cat reports as sightings persist across regions

Fifteen big-cat reports reached authorities in Wales between January 2020 and July 2025, and the latest official filing has put the issue back on the record. Welsh Government published FOI release 26962, titled Big cats, on 3 June 2026, describing it as information about big cats on the road network in Wales.

The figures do not settle what people are seeing, but they do show a trail of repeated claims that authorities have had to log, sort and preserve. In North Wales, WalesOnline reported on 2 January 2026 that four new big-cat sightings were logged in 2025, even as physical evidence remained scarce. The persistence of large black-cat reports in the region has helped keep the debate alive, not as folklore alone but as a recurring public-safety and record-keeping question.

South Wales carries its own history of reports. WalesOnline has described a long run of big-cat claims there, including the alleged attack on a young boy in Trellech in August 2000 and numerous livestock-related encounters across the region. That pattern matters because it shifts the story away from a single mystery sighting and toward a broader question about how rural Wales documents unusual wildlife claims, especially when the reports span roads, fields and villages over many years.

The Welsh Government’s own guidance on reporting invasive non-native species places that approach in a wider administrative frame. It says all non-native species records are useful because they help identify trends and track the spread of non-native plants and animals. That is the crucial institutional backdrop for the big-cat file: even when the creature itself remains unverified, the reports are still treated as data, and the data can reveal where stories cluster, where they recur and where official attention has been drawn.

What emerges is a familiar Welsh tension between evidence and legend. Big-cat sightings continue to surface across North Wales and South Wales, but the public record now shows something more concrete than myth alone: a government log, a series of sighting reports and a paper trail that keeps the mystery in the hands of the authorities rather than the folklore rack.