The Natural History of the Wild Cats

Everyone is familiar with big cats - the lion, tiger, leopards, jaguar and cheetah - members of the genus panthera. The smaller cats - members of the genus felis - are less familiar. This is a study of all 36 species of the cat family. It is particularly valuable for its abundant information on the smaller members of the cat family, the felids. The author begins by describing the general characteristics of the wild cats and their evolution. He then looks at each species with an account of its appearance, size, distribution and habitat preferences. Comparing and contrasting different species whenever relevant, he builds up a detailed picture of every member of the cat family. Further chapters follow detailing aspects of the cats' life cycles, from hunting strategies to breeding biology and social behaviour. He concludes with an account of the interaction between cats and man. Much has been written elsewhere about the super senses and the athletic bodies of cats. In Chapter 1 these adapations for hunting prey are discussed in the order in which they come into play during killing and feeding.
The cat family's history stretches back nearly 50 million years and has involved various evolutionary experiments about just how to build the world's most perfect predator. None are more famous than the sabretooths, whose liefestyles are described in Chapter 2 along with recent developments into elucidating the evolutionary relationships between the living cat species of today. All the cat species are described in Chapter 3 along with their known distributions. Measurements and weights are given in the appendix. In Chapter 4 there is a detailed look at hunting, killing and feeding behaviour of many different cats. On a wider scale the effect of predators on prey populatons and vice versa are also discussed at length. The cats' diets are described in Chapter 5. This chapter is intended more as a reference. More often than not it is the diet of a cat that is better known than the cat itself. In Chapter 6 the social organization of wild cats is discussed. There is also a lengthy discussion of the reasons why some cats, especially the cheetah, lion and domestic cat, opt for a social life. In Chapter 7 the reproductive behaviour and life histories of wild cats are described.
Much of what we know about mating and rearing kittens or cubs is based on the domestic cat or captive wild cats, except for a few studies of the bigger cats in open habitats. Finally, in Chapter 8 various aspects of the relationship between cats and humans are discussed. The fur trade, conservation, man-eating, domestication and re-introductions to the wild are all described.