Small Cat Conservation
Program

By any measure, the taxonomic family that we call the Felidae has been extraordinarily successful during its brief existence in Earth’s long history. Just in the past 10 to 12 million years, a burst of evolutionary divergence from a common ancestor produced the 36 distinct cat species that we know today. Wild cats are found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia and in a diversity of habitats ranging from desert to swamp to rain forest to mountain ranges. The domestic cat sitting on your couch is one vestige of that felid explosion, being only 3 to 5 thousand years of domestication removed from its closest wild relative, the African wild cat.

The world’s cat species share not only a common ancestry and basic body design but also, unfortunately, an unpredictable future. The plight of the larger cats, such as the tigers, the cheetahs and the snow leopards, has received most of the attention in the popular press and conservation circles and justifiably so since they may be facing the most dire threats of extinction due to habitat loss and direct human persecution. However, almost totally ignored in this groundswell of conservation concern are the more diminutive members of the felid family, those small cats weighing less than 20 kg (~45 pounds) that actually comprise 28 of the 36 cat species of the world. Some may be familiar to you – the ocelot, the lynx, the bobcat, for example – while others are probably much more obscure – the flat-headed cat, the kodkod, the black-footed cat – but all represent important components of the carnivore guilds found in functional ecosystems throughout the world.
Small cats are survivors, maintaining low profiles and frequently sharing habitat with their more massive cousins – the tigers, lions and jaguars – while dining further down the food chain on small birds, rodents, fish and insects. Like villagers in India or Africa, small cats don’t necessarily enjoy sharing their backyards with voracious large carnivores but they somehow manage to coexist because they have little choice to do otherwise.

Conservation of small cats is hampered by numerous factors, from ignorance about their very existence to lack of knowledge about their natural history or status in the wild to indifference about their survival. Education of the public about small cats is critically important since awareness and knowledge drive our conservation efforts, raising concerns about extinction, funding habitat preservation, setting research priorities, just making people care if ocelots or marbled cats still thrive somewhere out there, anywhere, in the wild.

So why should you care about the survival of any of these small cats? Undoubtedly, small cats are extremely charismatic, as any visitor to the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden can attest who has ever looked into the eyes of a Brazilian ocelot or encountered a baby Pallas’ cat up-close. Our world would be greatly diminished aesthetically if all the small felids were suddenly gone. Of course, we also have a moral obligation as humans to not carelessly exterminate the world’s wildlife species, including small cats, just because we can. If further incentive is required, small cats also play a vital ecological role in their natural environment, in some cases as the top predators in their specific ecosystem, such as with Pallas’ cats in Mongolia or possibly ocelots in southern Brazil. Their extinction can produce cascade effects downstream on predator-prey density and relationships that can ultimately collapse the entire ecosystem - to the detriment of all living things, including us.
Small cats definitely have their place in the wild – the problem is that so little research has been conducted with these species that we lack definitive information about their conservation status or what makes them tick biologically. We often assume that preserving adequate habitat for the big cats (as umbrella species) will have a trickle down effect in conserving small cats or that small cats require only minimal habitat sizes so they can persist in more restricted geographical areas. These assumptions ignore the potentially detrimental impact of interspecific competition between big and small cats and the habitat specialization common among small felids. The best places for small cats likely are areas that lack robust large cat populations so just conserving big cats is not the solution. Although most small cats may require smaller range sizes than big cats (but see the Pallas’ cat webpage), ecological specialization of some species, like fishing cats, restrict them to habitat types, such as wetlands, that are not widely distributed throughout the species’ geographic range.

How are zoos helping to conserve the small cats? The American Zoo & Aquarium Association (AZA), comprised of 218 institutions in the United States and Canada, established its first Species Survival Plans (SSPs) for small cats in 2001. Five species, the ocelot (Leopardalis pardus), fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus), Pallas’ cat (Otocolobus manul), black-footed cat (Felis nigripes) and sand cat (Felis margarita), are managed by SSPs to improve breeding success and genetic viability in captivity while striving to protect wild populations in range countries. The Cincinnati Zoo is one of the world’s leaders in small cat conservation through our research efforts at CREW, breeding programs in the Cat House, education initiatives with small felids and financial support for in situ projects. The Cincinnati Zoo also is the only AZA-accredited institution that houses all five of the small cat SSP species. In the small cat pages on the Zoo's website, we hope to educate you and other Zoo members about the extraordinary world of small cats and some of the ongoing efforts of the Zoo to broaden our basic knowledge of small cat biology, connect captive and wild cat populations and conserve these imperiled small felids in their natural environment.

What can you do to help conserve small cats? By becoming a CREW member or volunteer, you can help provide meaningful support to an organization that is working to conserve small cats, and help contribute to the cat research program.