Liger sighting in Suffolk

A concerned reader emailed us earlier today to report the sighting of a large cat on the grassy verge of the A12 in Suffolk.

Louise Nash from East Anglia spotted a very large cat lying in the sun on the grassy verge at the roadside somewhere between Corton and Hopton, not far from the Norfolk/Suffolk border. Louise described the beast as being very large, with stripes like a tiger but the brown colour of a lion.

“It was stripy like a tiger, but a brown colour instead of gold” Louise told us.

“Its tail was a very long tail with stripes all the way down to the tip. It was the tail that I had first seen which had drawn my attention to the cat as it had flicked up from the ground.”

Louise had been driving northbound on the A12 when she spotted the creature and believes the animal may have been injured, which would explain why it was lying at the side of the road in broad daylight on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Louise continued up the A12 for a few miles, drove around a roundabout at Hopton and went back down the A12 to get another look at the big cat, but by the time they returned to the same spot the animal had disappeared.

There are very few big cat species with stripes, other than the tiger. Some types of lynx and serval have a combination of spots and a few stripes but the only fully striped brown-coloured big cat is the liger, a hybrid cross between a male lion and a tigress.

Hopton is very close to Norfolk where big cat sightings have increased over the past few years, although most sightings of the Norfolk Panther have described a black cat. Here’s the updated map:

View Norfolk Panther Sightings in a larger map

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