FORMER African game warden Wayne Beardmore, of Charlton, believes a big cat was responsible for killing a deer he found on Monday morning.

The similarities between the deer Mr Beardmore found at the roadside between Ashton Keynes crossroads and Wootton Bassett and those carcasses he saw when he worked as a game warden in Kenya were too great to be a coincidence, he said.

"I have seen many sorts of kills and the way it has been killed is just too similar," he said. "For a fox to have done that damage is not likely."

His expert opinion has added weight to speculation about the so-called Minety Monster, a big cat which is believed to have slain sheep in the area.

Mr Beardmore, 28, will now offer his services to the police if any further carcasses are found.

"I know what they can do and I know how clever they are. They are highly intelligent animals," he said, adding that big cats have large territories and the same one could have easily travelled from Minety to Ashton Keynes, a distance of about six miles.

The carcass of the munkjack deer, which would have been about the size of a greyhound, had been stripped except for the head and the ears had been chewed, which is the trademark of a leopard or lion.

"When a leopard eats its kill that is what will be left," said Mr Beardmore.

In Africa, these remains would normally be devoured by scavengers like hyenas, but he said the remains he found were exactly like those that would be left if no hyenas were around.

Mr Beardmore, who worked as a game warden in Kenya for six months and then as a guide between 1991-1998, believes that a big cat could easily survive in the wild around Minety, living off pheasants and the occasional sheep or deer. "They can acclimatise to any environment," he said.

In February, the Gazette reported that 22 sheep had been savaged on farms in the Minety area in the space of a week.

At the time, vet Richard Pearson visited Ravenhurst Farm and said: "Whatever inflicted these injuries had to be a very large animal." He suggested it might be a large cat.

The sheep weren't eaten, but Mr Beardmore, who now works as a partner in his family's car repair business, Spray Magic in Chippenham, said the attacks were in keeping with the behaviour of a big cat like a lion, which in Africa would play cat and mouse games within herds of buffalo.

"I've seen lions kill buffalos just for the hell of it," he said.

Mr Beardmore said that he saw a big cat in the area about a year ago in a field near his home one evening.

"I will swear on my life that what I saw was definitely a cat, because of the shape of the tail," he said.

"There is a clear distinction between the tails of a cat and a dog."

The animal he saw resembled a panther, but he says he cannot be sure what kind of cat killed the deer.

In March, there were four reports of a big cat the size of an Alsatian dog in the Minety area. But in Mr Beardmore's opinion, the Minety Monster is not a threat to the public, as it has learned to avoid human contact.