POLICE marksmen armed with sniper’s rifles and automatic weapons staked out a ramshackle Welsh cottage yesterday after the owner’s dog had its throat torn out by a large black “puma-like” beast.

The officers set up a camouflaged hide alongside a rusty, corrugated-iron chicken run in the garden belonging to Joan Reynolds, 90. Their lair above a brook overlooked the woods from which the beast emerged on Sunday afternoon to kill Mrs Reynolds’s whippet.

Mike Shepherd, who looks after the housebound widow, described how he came face to face with the big cat after Mrs Reynolds called him to say she had lost two of her dogs. Mr Shepherd, 62, who lives a few miles from Mrs Reynolds’s home in the Black Mountains near Llangadog, set off to find the missing whippet and a Bedlington terrier.

“It was starting to get dark and first I went up the road to the telephone box because that’s where he was the last time he got out,” he said.

“Then I checked the house and there was nothing so I came outside again and went into the yard. That’s when I saw Peter the whippet laid out on the ground.

“I could see he had injuries and I knew he was dead because he wasn’t moving, but I didn’t see the other animal straight away. As I looked up I could see this big black cat standing right over the dog. It had blood on its face. Then I noticed there was another one, but that was very small.

“I’ve got to be honest with you, it didn’t look as if it was threatening me until it hissed at me. It sort of looked up and went ‘hissssssssss’.

“That’s why I panicked and ran in the house and shut the door and called the police.”

An armed response unit was on the scene in minutes and officers began a torchlight search of the area. As they entered the yard one of the officers caught sight of the beast on the other side of the fence, but could not get a clear shot. Moments later it had vanished up the hillside.

The whippet had had its throat torn out. The other dog, called Jason, was found terrified and shaking, hiding in an outhouse. Mr Shepherd said: “I don’t know what sort of cat it was, but it was big, black and had shiny fur.”

Mr Shepherd stretched out his arms to show how large the animal’s body was. He said: “It was about 5ft long, but that doesn’t include the tail.”

Mr Shepherd says he had a previous close encounter with the beast two years ago when he saw it emerging from Mrs Reynolds’s chicken run with a hen in its jaws. By the time police arrived that time the animal had gone, although officers were able to take casts of its paws.

The police officer who saw the beast on Sunday estimated that it was about 9ft or 10ft from nose to tail.

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