British big cats

In British folklore and urban legend, British big cats refers to the subject of reported sightings of non-native, typically large felids feral in the United Kingdom. Many of these creatures have been described as "panthers", "pumas" or "black cats".

There have been rare isolated incidents of recovered individual animals, often medium-sized species such as the Eurasian lynx, though 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.

The existence of a population of "true big cats" in Britain, however, especially a breeding population, has been rejected by experts and the British government owing to a lack of convincing evidence for the presence of these animals. Supposed sightings made from a distance have been largely written off as domestic cats close to the subject being misidentified as a larger animal sited farther away, with one folklorist considering such sightings of creatures to be little more than a "media artifact" driven by British journalistic practices in the 1970s and 1980s while another described it as the result of a situation where "media-generated interest encourages rumour, misinterpretation, and exaggeration".