Matt cook an interview

What inspired you? I'm interested in a whole range of fortean phenomena. But I became interested in big cats roaming the uk sometime in the 80s when I heard stories of the exmoor beast on the news. I can remember going a school camp as a child in the late 80s on the edge of exmoor and we were regaled with more stories of the cats by our teachers, which but the shit up us kids, I don't mind admitting. Then fast forward a few years to the early 90s, myself and two friends had driven from Bristol over the bridge into Wales as one friend new a farmer just outside of newport and we had his permission to use a bit of his land to mess around with our air rifles, just target shooting and the like.

It was getting on in the day and my two comrades in arms were down on theirs bellies shooting over the brow of a hill, sniper style.  I had decided that I'd had enough of shooting tin cans and I was next to them on the hill but I was on my back facing across a small valley just enjoying the sun. It was then that I noticed a large creature chasing a collie dog around an oak tree in the field opposite.  It took me a moment to realise that I was watching a large black cat chasing the poor dog in circles around the large oak. Now due to the passage of time the details have become a little blurred and I can't remember how long we watched it for. But although it was clear that  we were watching with the naked eye we all got a good look through our rifle scopes. And we all agreed that what we saw was a big cat of the non domestic variety. It carried on chasing the dog for some almost playing with it, then for some reason the cat just seemed to get bored at which point it belted up to the top of the field, through a fence never to be seen by us again.

So this combination of events have stayed with me over the years and the knowledge from my one sighting and of all the research and interviews I've conducted with witnesses over the years has very much inspired me to further my knowledge of creatures I'm sure are out there.

My Aims: Well I go "cating" with a friend of mine, all though I must admit we haven't been out for some time as I've been doing a little travelling, first down under to see family and of course a little yowie hunting and then to canada where I had a little poke around for sasquatch on vancouver island. Ed my cating companion and I have talked at length about our aims, and if we found conclusive proof from video of photographic evidence then we would just sit on it. Our goal is to just sight them and study them. The reason we would keep a lid on it is due to the safety of the animal. The last thing we would want would be some nutter with a gun trying to get a trophy ( as one certain well to do landowner I interviewed in 2014 threatened to do)
Plans for the future: Well I'm still really getting settled back into uk life but I'm hoping to get out after the cats again and hopefully Ed and I can get the trail can up again. We have formulated a pattern of seasonal movements from logging sightings in the Somerset area on a map so it would be nice if we could get real confirmation of this.