In British folklore, British big cats, also referred to as ABCs (Alien, or Anomalous, Big Cats), phantom cats and mystery cats, feature in reported sightings of large felids feral in the British Isles. Many of these creatures have been described as "panthers", "pumas" or "black cats". The existence of a population of "true big cats" in Britain, especially a breeding population, is rejected by many experts owing to a lack of convincing evidence for the presence of these animals. There have been some incidents of recovered individual animals, often medium-sized species such as the Eurasian lynx, but in one 1980 case a puma was captured alive in Scotland. These are generally believed to have been escaped or released exotic pets that had been held illegally, possibly released after the animals became too difficult to manage or after the introduction of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976. Some sightings at a distance may be explicable as domestic cats seen near to a viewer being misinterpreted as larger animals seen farther away. A fringe theory suggests that the animals may be survivors from the Ice Age, a time when leopards, scimitar-toothed cats, lions, and lynxes were found in the British Isles. While such animals are not known to have survived to the present, in his 2013 book Feral, George Monbiot argues that humans are programmed to notice things that might be big cats because of the threat they posed in prehistoric times. Reported sightings Documentation The group Big Cats in Britain published reported sightings annually by county. The "top ten" counties or regions of Great Britain between April 2004 and July 2005 were: First sightings William Cobbett recalled in his Rural Rides how, as a boy in the 1760s, he had seen a cat "as big as a middle-sized Spaniel dog" climb into a hollow elm tree in the grounds of the ruined Waverley Abbey near Farnham in Surrey. Later, in New Brunswick, he saw a "lucifee" (North American lynx – Felis lynx canadensis) "and it seemed to me to be just such a cat as I had seen at Waverley." Another report appeared in the Daily Express on 14 January 1927 of a "lynx" being seen. The New Forest folktale of the Stratford Lyon tells of how John de Stratford pulled a giant, red, antlered lion from the ground at South Baddesley in the New Forest in the year 1400. The