If so we would like to hear from you." So goes the appeal on the Big Cats in Britain website, and it is a serious question; a wee reminder for anyone who let their (really big) cat out and forgot about it.
Britain's big cats, real or otherwise, are all the rage this summer.
Consider the hysteria at the beginning of the week over the so-called Essex Lion – almost certainly a misunderstanding of epic proportions. Someone saw a large domestic cat and triggered a massive, armed police operation.
Experts from Colchester Zoo and police firearms officers helped in the search, which the police later called off after no trace of a big cat was found. One family stepped forward to claim the kerfuffle was all over their domestic moggie.
And yet, for some, the appeal of big cats – really big cats – endures.
Big Cats in Britain has just held its annual Big Cat Watch, a nation-wide project that saw experts and enthusiasts holed up in hides in almost 30 remote locations the length and breadth of Britain.
Their mission: to find conclusive evidence that large, predatory felines exist out there, somewhere.
So far, hard-and-fast proof of the presence of sizeable carnivores remains thin on the ground, but the community of observers who spent the weekend trying to track down that evidence battle on, undeterred.
There have been 170 reported sightings this year alone, they say.
Mark Fraser, 49, from Kilmaurs, East Ayrshire, founded Big Cats in Britain a decade ago, and it is now the largest and most active group of big-cat enthusiasts in the country.
Fraser spent the Big Cat Watch hunting for evidence in the Galloway forest, without success, but he is used to being patient.
In 20 years he has had three big-cat moments, first in Lincolnshire, then in Strathaven in North Lanarkshire and lastly, five years ago, in Ireland.
In that first case, Fraser and his colleagues held a week-long "vigil" – his word – to find evidence that could be analysed in a lab. What they found came back positive: DNA evidence that a black leopard was in their midst.
Even so, Fraser retains a rationalist's scepticism about his quest.
"It is the mystery," he says, "the not knowing what is out there, if there is anything out there at all, because the majority of sightings are mistakes.
"What we are lacking in the whole of Britain is the actual hard evidence to back these sightings up.
"I am the only one who has worked on a case where we have found leopard hairs that have been analysed as a black leopard, but there should be a hell of a lot more cases like that."
Fraser's co-trackers have included soldiers, engineers, a policeman, lorry drivers, a South African bush tracker, zoologists, ecologists and paleontologists.
They placed 70 cameras in various rural locations throughout Britain including sites in Lanarkshire, Fife, Ayrshire, Perthshire, Invernesshire and Morayshire.
Until the 1970s it was not uncommon for people to keep big cats and other game animals as pets.
However, the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976 declared keeping such animals without a licence illegal and many big cats are believed to have been released into the wild as a result.
Fraser added: "It is not necessarily that we believe the country is full of leopards. We research the sightings and we want hard evidence to back up the amount of sightings that come in.
"Ninety per cent of the sightings are of a big black cat. People say it is a black panther, which is a generic term for any large black cat.
"A black leopard or a black jaguar would be the only two candidates, and it is highly unlikely it is going to be a jaguar so it is either a black leopard or a mistake – a very large feral cat.
"We know that from all the pictures that people send in of domestic cats.
"What we really want to do is photograph it. It is easier said that done, but people can make casts of prints, or they can collect hair samples. It is going to be very hard for anyone to have a sighting, but the only times I have actually seen them is when I have been out there."
Douglas Richardson, animal collections manager at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland's Highland Wildlife Park, is a man with 37 years of experience of working with exotic animals.
He says it is perfectly possible that big cats are out there, right now, in the British countryside.
He points to a case in Kenya where people in a densely populated suburb of Nairobi discovered, by chance, that they had been living alongside a large number of leopards for years ... and no-one had noticed.
"In Nairobi they'd trapped one leopard with a view to putting a radio collar on it, " he says. "They had it in a holding area on the outskirts and it got out. Everybody panicked. They put out lots of traps.
"They caught leopards alright, but none of them were the one they'd originally caught.
"What they hadn't realised was that leopards were regularly coming to the Nairobi outskirts, and nobody knew.
"That is a country with a fairly healthy population of leopards, and to all intents and purposes they'd been invisible.
"If – a big if – anything like that were here, the likelihood of someone spotting one is incredibly low.
"As far as whether they could survive, though, there's not a problem at all. There's a huge food supply. There's no other large predators for them to compete with. We have a large deer population that is out of control, particularly in Scotland.
"Even things like rabbits, pets, would all be legitimate targets. As far as most of the big cats are concerned, they're pretty adaptable from a climactic extreme perspective.
"The idea that something could tick along quite nicely in the UK countryside is very, very feasible."
And yet Richardson, ever the optimistic expert, sounds a note of caution: "Obviously, the idea of a big cat running around the UK, it's a pretty cool idea – that there's something out there, a bit Loch Ness Monster, it would be very nice if such a thing did exist, and we had the proof.
"For a lot of people there's a desire to see something. We see it in a zoo environment when people come in, standing at an enclosure in front of a sign that tells them what they're looking at, and they still get it wrong.
"The vast majority of alleged big-cat sightings, including the ones I've been asked to go and have a look at, turn out to be domestics."
