One day one of them, which had been exploring the hollows of an old tree close by, rushed into my tent and fell down in convulsions at my feet. Whilst I was at work I usually had one in my lap and the other cuddled behind my back on the chair. and on my arrival next morning I would find them frisking about the tent roof between the two canvasses, or scrambling up the trees under which we were pitched. At night the little cats were put into a basket. They became perfectly tame, so much so that, although for nine months of the year I was out in camp, they never left the tents, although allowed to roam about unconfined. "I had two kittens brought to me by a Gond in the Seonee district, and I kept them for many months. In his 1884 book, Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon, British naturalist Robert Armitage Sterndale described his experience with some rusty-spotted cats, Its activity was quite marvellous and it was very playful and elegant in its motions." Jerdon kept a number of rusty-spotted cats in his home for research, and according to Wild Cats of the World by Swiss naturalist and writer Charles Albert Walter Guggisberg, he said of them, "I had a kitten brought to me when very young in 1846, and it became quite tame, and was the delight and admiration of all who saw it. Nineteenth century British physician and zoologist Thomas C. Unlike another very rare and small wildcat species, the Scottish wildcat, rusty-spotted cats are easy to tame, and there have been some reports of this species being bred with domestic cats. And she'll only ever have one or two kittens in a litter, born after a gestation period of around 67 days. They're not an easy species to breed - compared to the domestic cat's estrous cycle (when the cats are 'on heat' and ready to mate) of 14 to 21 days during breeding season in spring, the rusty-spotted cat's estrous lasts just five days. Which, by the way, is the average weight for a domestic cat (I'm not a terrible mum).īerlin Zoo's two new kittens were born on August 5, would have weighed somewhere between 60 - 77 g. And my giant beast of a tuxedo cat is 4 kg. To put this in perspective, the world record for the smallest adult tabby cat is 1.36 kg. Their long bodies and tails, which can reach a total of 78 cm in the largest males, might out-stretch their African relatives, but they're just a little bit lighter at 0.9 - 1.6 kg. Nicknamed 'the hummingbirds of the cat family', rusty spotted cats (Prionailurus rubiginosus) rival the black-footed cats ( Felis nigripes) of southern Africa for the title of world's smallest wild cat. It doesn't get any better than that.īerlin Zoo has announced the birth of its first rusty-spotted cat kittens since it opened 168 years ago.
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