The Man Who Still Believes This is the Border Beast

The Man Who Still Believes This is the Border Beast Back to Irish News

Charlie McGuinness gazes out of his kitchen window at the lush rolling fields behind his house on the edge of Monaghan Town. The sloping terrain rises from a hollow at the end of hi sperectly maintained back lawn.
He finds it hard not to keep looking. For beneath this picture of rural serenity something dangerous and unusual might be lurking.
Four times in the last seven weeks, Charlie has seen what he believes is a large wild animal walking calmly across these very fields. On the last two occasions - last Saturday and Monday - his wife Helen managed to capture it on a digital video camera from an upstairs window.
Her shaky footage of the long-tailed black creature, sleekly padding its way through the grass and hedges, is the most solid argument for the case that a puma is lurking in the countryside.
The existence of the Monaghan puma has been the subject of considerable debate this past week. Some locals have been understandably fearful for the safety of their children. Others dismiss the story as a fanciful hoax, the result of some people not being able to differentiate between a normal tomcat on the prowl and a vicious killer on the loose.
Charlie McGuinness is conscious of text unreadable .........whole thing is a joke. But his wife's video shots are certainly compelling. The first reaction on seeing the large black creature is that this is no domestic tabby, but something far bigger and much more exotic.
But any hope of positively identifying the beast is greatly hampered by the distance involved. The animal is never any nearer then 150 yards, and in Monday’s pictures it is more than twice that distance away. This makes it hard to estimate the creatures size. However, it seems unlikely that a normal domestic cat could be picked out with such clarity at such a distance, even with a zoom lens.
Mr McGuinness, a farmer and a businessman, first saw a black animal walking through his back fields in early May. He saw something similar again about two weeks later. “Helen was with me the second time. She said that’s a dog. But I said that’s not a dog, look at the way its gliding along.”
He thought little more about it until the puma rumours began circulating. When he heard about an unusual attack on a calf on Newbliss – about ten miles away – he thought it wise to tell the Garda what he had seen, in case there may be any risk to children. The McGuinness household at Tully is adjacent to a large housing estate.
Then around 9.30 last Saturday evening it appeared again. He ran down the garden with binoculars to get a closer view, while Helen dashed upstairs with the video camera. “I was about 100 yards from it. It was definitely some form of cat. People have been phoning me up and saying ‘you saw a puma; I saw some sort of cat, but wether it was one you’d give a saucer of milk to, or a bucket of milk, I don’t know.” He says the animal was definitely bigger than a normal cat; his instinctive response was to go “wow”. “Oh Jeez, yea, it was very, very big,” he adds. The next sighting was around 11.15 on Monday morning. This time Helen got considerably more footage, but the animal was significantly farther away. Another five or six people, watching from the house, saw it too. Around noon a similar animal was seen by staff close to Monaghan General Hospital, about two miles away.
Peader Morgan, a retired conservation warden, was n absolutely no doubt when he saw the footage; he was convinced it was a puma. The Garda thought the evidence was sufficient to launch an elaborate search of the locality. A helicopter with thermal-imaging equipment was called out to scan the hedgerows and an army sniper was placed on standby should the animal be spotted.
The search was put on hold on Tuesday evening after nothing was found. Gardai are frankly puzzled over wether the creature is indeed a puma. They are reluctant to draw any firm conclusions, saying they are keeping an open mind on the matter.
Matters descended almost to the level ofa farce on Monday evening when RTE entered the picture. The station initially aired the footage taken by Helen McGuinness. But it also sent its own camera to the McGuinness house in the hope that the animal might show up yet again.
And sure enough another sighting was made, and the exclusive new animal was aired on the 9o’clock news. But on closer inspection the new animal had white markings on its face and front. The RTE puma, it transpired, was nothing more than a large cat of the native variety. Not surprisingly, this gave way to much ribbing in the newspapers. It also appeared to confirm that both RTE and the people of Monaghan were letting their imaginations get the better of them.
Charlie McGuinness does not believe that the cat shot by RTE was the one filmed by his wife. The Garda are reluctant to commit themselves, but they think it was probably the same animal. At the same time, they are not ruling anything out.
In al, say Gardai, there have been four or five sightings in Monaghan Town and another three or four in Newbliss. But the majority of these were found to be domestic cats. The most significant evidence from the Newbliss area has been the unusual death of a calf owned by farmer Martin Murphy. The rear part of the animals carcass was eaten away in a manner which suggested the work of a large wild animal.
Department of Argriculture veterinarian Des Patton, who examined the calf, says its injuries were very unusual. Over the years, he has witnesses many attacks by dogs and foxes, but none were like this. A normal predator would eat from other parts of the carcass.
Some days later, he was called to a farm to examine an unusual attack on a pet goat. The animal’s neck had been ripped open in a vicious manner, though it was still alive. He concluded it was the work of a large wild dog. Local people told him that there was a wild Alsatian loose in the area.
Despite the unusual death of the calf, Mr. Patton believes a dog was also responsible. The dog showed no sign of being choked or suffocated as a puma would have done, to have killed it. He feels it may have been killed by a dog before another scavenger happened along. “I‘m working purely on what I have seen myself.”
Cat expert Gerry Creighton Snr. believes that, whatever is stalking the fields of Monaghan is no puma. He says it is nothing more than a very large feral cat. Pumas aren’t even black, he says, but a rusty, browny grey. Panthers and jaguars are black, but he doesn’t think its one of these either.
Mr Creigton who is curator of large mammals at Dublin Zoo, says a puma would leave tell-tale droppings and scratch marks on trees. A puma would stick to certain walking paths – as does the animal seen on the McGuinness land – but he says a feral cat would do exactly the same.
A puma, he says, would not ordinarily be a danger to humans. The animals instinct would be to go off and hide. But if it came to it, they would be more likely to attack a child rather then an adult. “In its natural state a puma would eat wild hogs, deer, small mammals, raccoons, pheasants and turkeys. Here in Ireland it might go for rabbits and hares, even foxes or badgers, it also likes dogs.”
He says it wouldn’t normally venture near a housing estate, but if it did, the unexplained disappearance of pet dogs may be a clue to its presence. “The only danger to a human would be if you came across one while it was feeding. The thing to do in that situation would be to stay quiet, stay still, don’t panic and make no sudden movements. It would probably just slink away.”
Gerry Creighton knows all about puma sightings. He investigated one in Blessington, C Wicklow, last summer, and another in St Annes Park, Raheny, early this year. Both were false alarms, he says, with an air of a man who knew all along that they would be. And for the record, he believes the Newbliss calf was eaten by a badger.
Meanwhile the people of Monaghan have their eyes peeled for stirrings in the undergrowth. A wild cat or a wild goose? Is there really a man-eating monster or is it just silly-season over-kill? The scoffers are keeping their backdoors closed just in case.
Irish Independent: 3rd July 2004

Do you have any information on the above reports. Were you the person involved, or are you aware of any more sightings in this area. We would appreciate any information that you could give us.