Party Vibe

@Digital Buddha 986592 wrote:

GL is a rave fossil.

in NL they have the word “popdinosaurus” for those such as Mick Jagger who are still around and alive, although with the “pirate music” scene (which is in many ways a forerunner of modern EDM) folk are all still going strong well into their 70s raaa

@smokemary 986679 wrote:

Also is the stories of big wild cats in England true or where they all false?

There are several large cats including lions and tigers kept in captivity across England, although by law they must be kept in alarmed enclosures with CCTV etc as part of their licensing conditions and in enclosures as secure as or more so than a traditional zoo.

Sightings also depend on what size cat is classed as “big”. Some longhaired European breeds of pet cat can be physically larger than others, and perspective can make the cats seem way larger than they actually are. One tom cat which was hunting in fields in Essex was recently mistaken for a lion (with both Police helicopters and Colchester Zoo called out to search for it).

Medium size cats such as fishing cats, servals, jungle cats are often kept as pets in England, there is a fishing cat (more usually found in Bangladesh) in West Suffolk. All of these can hybridise with domestic cats, their offspring are also larger than many would expect (the larger “oriental” breeds of cat are themselves
hybrids of Asian wildcats and “European” species). It is often these medium size cats wandering outside their enclosures or hybrids that spark all the reports of “big cats” in England, although none of them pose any danger to humans.

These are Bengal cat + Serval hybrids. The female is about the size of a normal pet cat. The picture was posted on a forum popular with hippies a few years back and I was advised they live in a normal house SW England.

The Essex tomcat had perched on an empty fertiliser drum left in a farmers field (which was on a hill) so it could watch mice – what happened was some holidaymakers from Lincolnshire noticed it, misidentified it as a much larger animal and (in good faith) called 999 :laugh_at:

Most of of the “wild/exotic” medium size cats kept in private collections across Europe are looked after by families who also keep other breeds of cats, dogs and all sorts of other pet animals and in spite of their size live peacefully with all the other species, although the Oriental breeds are notorious for making noise and if not kept occupied they get up to mischief (opening up doors, nicking food etc) and will encourage other pets to do the same!

The Romanian folk at my work said this is a fairly common problem in their villages, as people have cut down too many trees there, depriving the bears of their habitat and pushing them into the human settlements.

A few years ago a work colleague of mine had to reassure our new staff from RO that it was safe to walk in the woods of Suffolk (which are exactly the same as those in RO) and there were no bears in England outside of zoos.

The Romanian workers had even looked online at Natural England website but at the time a combination of budget cuts and govt blunders at the time meant they had simply published the entire EU protected species list without removing the non-native species, one of the first entries on the full list is the European Brown Bear! (This has since been corrected).