Wild Cats

Wild cats comprises 36 or so wild species that inhabits almost all the continents except Australia where once freely roamed Tasmanian tiger or Thylacine gone extinct by early 30s. The extant species of wild cats are still versatile ranging from small to medium size and of course big cats like tigers, leopard, cheetah, lions etc that we are familiar with. Most of us are not familiar with for example Borneo Bay Cat, Jaguarundi, Iromote cat (subspecies of Leopard cat), Oncilla, Margay, Clouded Leopard, Fishing Cat and many more. These cats are all cute like all other cats and sadly facing extinction crisis across their home range. Most of the high conservation funds are directed to save high profile flagship carnivores like tigers and lions but funding to secure long term future for small to medium sized wild cats are few and far between. These species are secretive like almost all cats are and often one of the major impediments belies successful implementation of ecological survey design which not only require skilled manpower (for example wildlife biologist focused on carnivore ecology) but also decent grant support. Coupled with these social and political setbacks in cats home range nations coupled with administrative and weak economic conditions make it extremely difficult to help conserve cats that are slowly but surely diminishing from our planet. And when species are gone, they gone forever and there is no way to bring them back. I do not know how many of these 36 wild cats will survive by the turn of this century considering man made development have already destroyed majority of their ecosystems across the continents. Acknowledging that, I pull together some rare moments in video clips to showcase some of these amazingly fascinating wild cats that many of us may not have the chance to see them in the wild anyhow. Enjoy!

First video clip below here is cute Serval which lives in Africa (Afrotropic Biome)