Scottish Wildcats (1 Viewer)

[sidwemn]

The Scottish Wildcat release scheme have recently released news that two females have had kittens this year. Whilst this is great news, the video posted on Twitter shows the black dorsal line on the adult female and both kittens extending well down the tail. I'm no expert, but had I seen these cats in the wild I would have dismissed them as hybrids. Can pure Wildcats show this extent of black on the dorsal?

Martyn

https://twitter.com/x/status/1805143739322486858

 

[jurek]

I think this project found that no pure Wildcats exist in Scotland, and breeds and releases hybrids with least admixture of domestic cat genes.

An alternative would be to release Wildcats from France and Germany, where most Wildcats are pure, lots of them breed in zoos and some are released to the wild (the validity of the endemic Scottish wildcat subspecies grampia is doubtful).

 

[Farnboro John]

There is internecine warfare between two Wildcat projects in Scotland one of which (Wildcat Haven) has done some excellent work neutering domestic and feral cats across a swathe of habitat in the Ardnamurchan peninsula while the ZSS gang fool about captive breeding hybrids with poor tails, bad dorsal lines and huge amounts of white on the face for release into the heavily feral-infested Cairngorms.

The ultimate insult came when ZSS attempted to nick the last decent cats in Scotland from Ardnamurchan to aid their futile efforts in the more densely populated side of Scotland, simultaneously implicitly acknowledging where any hope at all lay and attempting to sabotage it.

John