Here be Dragons? No, big cats! Predator symbolism in rural West Wales

Abstract

The presence of non‐endemic ‘Alien Big Cats’ (ABCs) in Britain is an oft debated topic in the press and the public sphere, especially in rural areas where agriculture is the dominant industry. Based on seven years of fieldwork in a farming community in rural Ceredigion, West Wales, this paper considers the ‘Big Cat’ phenomenon from the perspectives of informants for whom inexplicable livestock losses must be accounted for and ‘rationalised’. Moreover, in this ethnographic context, ABCs, like other transgressive non‐human animals, have become particularly powerful metaphors for the humans who encounter them.

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