Every 12 months, the NGO Wildlife SOS receives calls from panicked villagers who’ve mistaken a juvenile rusty noticed cat for a leopard cub.
The rusty noticed cat is the smallest wild cat on this planet. It doesn’t develop to greater than 1.5 ft in size (not together with its foot-long tail) and infrequently weighs greater than 2 kg. Unlike leopards, which might weigh as much as 70 kg and are apex predators, this cat’s largest prey are frogs and sure small birds.
Wildlife SOS usually conducts a medical examination after which waits till their mom seems to reclaim them, however many tales involving wild small cats in India have less-happy endings. It is usually a case of an excessive amount of love, or too little.
Among different threats similar to lack of habitat, small cats are captured and trapped as pets, or mistaken for extra menacing massive cats and attacked or killed. They are even, in some circumstances, mistakenly hunted for his or her meat.
A key subject is that we all know too little about them, says Shomita Mukherjee, senior principal scientist on the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
“There are instances where the kittens of small cats have been mistaken for domestic cats and brought home, only to find that their behaviour is different,” says Kishor Rithe, director of the Bombay Natural History Society. The kittens are usually then deserted or should spend a 12 months being reintroduced to the wild (if they’ve been away from their mom for various days, the probabilities of a profitable reunion are slim.)
The caracal, in the meantime, is elusive and so uncommon that there are simply two identified viable populations in India, one every in Ranthambore and Kutchh.
There are experiences of the Eurasian lynx, a medium-sized species present in Ladakh, being mistaken for the wolf, which is considered as a risk to livestock.
The fishing cat is typically mistaken for the civet, which is hunted for its meat. The fishing cat is an endangered species present in wetlands in South and South-East Asia. The world’s first census of this species outdoors a protected space, carried out in 2022 across the Chilika lake in Odisha, discovered 176 people within the area.
Profit is usually a motive too. “In Gujarat, our team has found that poachers are intentionally picking up small cats and selling them as leopard cubs,” says Raj Bhavsar, mission coordinator at Wildlife SOS and president of the Gujarat Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Bell the cat
The scale of the risk to India’s wild small cats is critical, and the shortage of information solely clouds the issue.
All of the nation’s 11 species of untamed small cats, for example, characteristic on the IUCN Red List of threatened species globally.
Unlike massive cats, these smaller wild cats are likely to feed on prey that’s smaller than them, and thus play a significant position in ecosystem administration. Most feed on small rodents.
In one in every of Mukherjee’s early cat-diet research, she discovered {that a} single jungle cat (which weighs about 4 kg) and a single caracal (about 6 kg) on the Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan ate as much as 5,000 rodents a 12 months. This makes them indispensable in rodent inhabitants management.
“One of the reasons we know so little about our small cats is because they are so hard to study,” says Mukherjee. “For one, they are small. Several are nocturnal and solitary. Because they have keener senses than us, they detect us before we detect them, and then stop doing what they were doing and run away, or go silent and watch us instead, and we don’t obtain much information.”
Technology helps considerably, permitting researchers to check animal scat on the molecular degree, to glean much more about these animals, their populations and habitats. “We also have a much better idea of some small cat species’ distribution, although it’s not complete information, because of tiger monitoring exercises that have involved setting camera traps across large swathes,” says Mukherjee of the Salim Ali centre.
For occasion, the rusty noticed cat, traditionally discovered solely in India and Sri Lanka, was noticed for the primary time in Nepal in 2016, in digicam traps arrange for a tiger census. They have been noticed in an increasing vary of ecosystems throughout India too, by way of such digicam traps.
To actually study small cats although, Mukherjee says, researchers must design much more particular camera-trap research. “For tigers, for instance, one may place one camera per 5 sq km,” she says. “But there will possibly be many more individuals of several small cat species in that area, since they have smaller home ranges. We have to go at it with a fine-toothed comb, to fill the gaps in our data.” All this whereas, small cat habitats shrink and fragment, roadkill stays a persistent risk, and poaching for small cats as unique pets continues.
The authorities has made one thing of a begin. In 2020, the union atmosphere ministry, together with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), World Wide Fund for Nature, Global Tiger Forum and India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), launched a small-cat conservation programme in Uttar Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Rajasthan, to safe small-cat habitats and encourage group participation and company partnerships.
Still, there is no such thing as a concerted effort for the conservation of small cats in India, says YV Jhala, former dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, an autonomous institute below the atmosphere ministry. “The belief is that if you conserve apex predators, such as the tiger and lion, everything else will stabilise. But that is not the case. In fact, in the effort to increase tiger and lion numbers, habitats are being changed to increase their prey. The umbrella role of the tiger and lion is compromised when management interventions go beyond ecological carrying capacities, and that’s detrimental for small cats and for the habitat as a whole.”
Jhala argues that small cats have a very important position in ecosystem administration as a result of they regulate small mammal and chook populations that have an effect on people essentially the most.
“It’s still difficult to say what the impact of losing our small cats would be, because we’re still figuring out the extent of their populations and distribution across the country, and have rudimentary information on the populations of a few species,” provides Mukherjee. “But as chief rodent-eaters, we can logically assume that the impact would be immense.”
