Beast of Bodmin—still just a big cat or something else?

I've been reading about the Beast of Bodmin for years and the explanation "escaped exotic pet" has never sat right with me. Yes, cats get out. But the consistency of sightings over 40+ years? The physical evidence that doesn't quite match any known cat species?

I'm not saying it's Bigfoot. I'm saying there's something on those moors that we don't fully understand yet. Wildlife experts have been baffled before - the giant squid was "impossible" until it wasn't.

Anyone got recent sightings or tracks from the area? There's got to be someone on here who's actually been out there looking.

The Beast of Bodmin is a textbook case of mass hysteria mixed with misidentified sheep kills. The "physical evidence" is invariably either fox damage or large dog predation. When they actually investigated properly in the 1990s, they found nothing. Nothing.

My uncle lived in Cornwall for 30 years and never saw or heard anything credible. What he DID see were a lot of people making money from tourists wanting to hunt a mythical cat. Follow the money on these things.

I'm with OP. The absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Something large and powerful enough to kill livestock regularly would be hard to film in the 1980s and 90s. Our standards for proof are unfairly high for cryptids but embarrassingly low for other stuff.

Did anyone consider that there might be MULTIPLE explanations operating at once? Some sightings could be misidentified animals, some could be hoaxes, and some could be actual unknown species. We treat it like a binary thing when it's probably messier.

There's allegedly paw prints in the archives somewhere. Have they ever DNA tested them? That's the kind of thing that would actually move the needle instead of anecdotes and arguments.