A FARMER who claims to have come face to face with the legendary ‘Huttock Top Beast’ has dismissed a new video apparently showing it chasing a chicken.

Terry Bork has blamed the beast, which he thinks could be a leopard roaming the Rossendale moors, for several vicious attacks at Huttock Top Farm in Bacup.

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But he said a clip purporting to show it in Norden, near Rochdale, is ‘just a pussy cat or a wild fox’.

CCTV footage of the black creature with a bushy tail chasing a chicken in a farmyard went viral on the internet earlier this week.

But Terry said: “What I saw was definitely a leopard. You see the animal on this footage and you want to stroke it, but what I saw would make you go, ‘Wow.’ “What I saw was ten times bigger than that. This thing moves like a fox. I would say it’s a vixen.”

Terry said he first encountered the beast when he gave chase to what he thought was a large dog after it stole a duck at his farm.

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He said: “I began to chase it with a spade, but then I realised it was a wild cat. Put it this way, I turned around and went the other way. I was excited but scared at the same time.”

Although he says he has not seen the beast for a number of years, Terry still believes it is in the area.

“We had a bad incident earlier this year when a sheep was attacked by a wild cat,” he said.

“The guy who rents land off me has seen it after telling me I was off my head, and a few residents have seen footprints in the snow.”

British Big Cats Society spokesman Danny Bamping said of the video: “It could be a wild cat, it could be a feral cat, but it’s not a big cat. Lancashire and Greater Manchester have been hot spots for sightings for a number of years.”

Big cats are classed as felines that can roar, such as lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards.

Other ‘big’ cats, such as the lynx or puma, are not considered part of the larger species.

Until the mid-70s, it was legal to own an exotic species in the UK without a licence. When the Dangerous Wild Animals Act was introduced in 1976, many owners released them into the wild to survive on their own, leading to numerous sightings, both proven and fabled, over the years.