Are Bangladesh’s small cats walking the same path as Scottish Wildcats?
Centuries of persecution, aggressive farming, forest clearing, and attempts to introduce foreign games drove native British fauna northward, all seeking a safe distance from humans
The view was picturesque: an autumn blue sky speckled with cotton-white clouds, stretched above undulating swaths of parrot green grass and grey-golden patches of woods. This scene would easily beat the iconic Windows XP wallpaper.
I was travelling from a small city to a smaller university town — my first day there. But something was missing in this scenic countryside. ''Where are all the wildlife?'' I wondered. My eyes, adjusted to tropical biodiversity and expecting various farmland birds, were quick to notice an eerie void.
Today the large carnivores of Bangladesh are all extinct or teetering on their last legs, leaving small carnivores at the crosshairs of development. Our fishing cats, jungle cats and leopard cats are enduring a treatment akin to what the Highland tiger had once suffered for two centuries
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However, after about nine months, I now consider myself fortunate to have begun my first leg of higher studies in Scotland — the last wild place in the British Isles. Scottish mountains and glens, coasts and firths, burns and islets are the refuge of a myriad of species. From moths and butterflies to buntings and crows, from cats and rats to seals and dolphins, tracing the history of almost every one of them leads to one tragedy after another.
Centuries of persecution, aggressive farming, forest clearing, and attempts to introduce foreign games drove native British fauna northward, all seeking a safe distance from humans.
And among these stories, the story of the Scottish Wildcats hints at the possible grim future of small cats in Bangladesh.
As small as domestic tabbies
Whenever we discuss an extinction story of a carnivore, we often imagine the animal as big, ferocious, and threatening. This is not the case with the Scottish Wildcat. This cat is barely larger than a regular house cat and is significantly smaller than many bigger breeds, such as Maine Coons.
The wildcats are distributed across three continents: Asia, Europe, and Africa. Currently, three species are recognised; the Afro-Asian Wildcat, European Wildcat, and Chinese Mountain Cat are the wild progenitors of domestic cats. All wildcats are extremely adaptive, living in arid and semi-arid environments, in orchards and vineyards, in mountainous and high-altitude plateaus. And they live in close affinity with humans.
Bangladesh does not have any wildcats. But there are three similarly small cat species with similar preference to live in close associations with humans: the Jungle Cat, Fishing Cat, and Leopard Cat.
Wildcats have a grey-based coat, pointed ears, and a striped, blunt and fluffy tail. The coat pattern of Scottish Wildcats is distinctive, more pronounced than any tabby and ginger cat. They diverged off the Mainland Europe population about 7,000 to 9,000 years ago after the last ice age, which essentially trapped them on an island.
The Highland tiger
The Scottish Wildcat is also known as the Highland tiger. The resilient cat is a true survivor, adapted to thrive in the harsh and unforgiving Scottish Highlands. But this was not the case in the beginning.
The Scottish Wildcat had been in Britain before the arrival of men, and it used to live all over the island. Since the 16th century, unprecedented growth and development sealed the cat's fate. In addition to farming expansion and habitat loss, the practice of rearing game animals marked the cat as an 'enemy of the state'.
By the 1700s, the cat had disappeared from southern England. In the mid-19th century, the cat's range became disjointed, with a pocket in Wales and the rest up to the southern border of Scotland. By the 1880s, it became extinct in Wales too; its range shrank to north-west Scotland.
The northern retreat continued. By 1915, the wildcat was cornered in the Highlands, its back facing the North Sea. Since then, the formidable landscape has provided a functional hideout for the Scottish Wildcat; the Highland tiger was born.
Today, there are no other wild cat species in Great Britain. Lions died out 13,000 years ago and now only live on the English crest. The lynx, a medium-sized cat, became extinct during the Roman era. Scottish wildcats are now the only living species.
Nobody would have imagined such a fateful outcome for such a small-sized cat.
The last bolt
If not for World War I, the wildcats might have become completely extinct like their larger cousins. Human expansion, gamekeeping practices, and overall persecution rate slowed down after the war.
But the wildcat number became perilously low. As with many other small wildlife populations, more challenging problems arose. Wildcat genes began to dilute through breeding with feral and free-ranging house cats. At present, for every pure-breed male wildcat, there exists roughly 80 fertile hybrid females. So much so, that it is now believed that only 35–400 pure-breed wildcats exist in the vast 25,000 sq km of Scottish Highlands.
There is now a systematic Trap-Neuter-Vaccination-Release programme for free-ranging cats to stem the rate of dilution and risk of disease spillovers.
Researchers have conceded that less than 5% hybridisation is acceptable, starting a captive-breeding and release programme. Last year, 23 such individuals were rewilded; more to be released soon. There are debates around this approach. But again, who knew about this unforeseen fate for a small cat?
A troubling parallel
Small cats and carnivores construct the secondary layers of an ecosystem. The larger counterparts form the tertiary layers. When this topmost layer is peeled off, the layer beneath gets exposed to human contact. How that might have happened can be glimpsed in the colonial era hunting anecdotes or gazetteers.
Take Bangladesh for example. Today the large carnivores are all extinct or teetering on their last legs, leaving small carnivores at the crosshairs of development. Our fishing cats, jungle cats and leopard cats are enduring a treatment akin to what the Highland tiger had once suffered for two centuries.
The leopard cats are now largely confined to forests. Jungle cats and fishing cats, adapted to live in non-conventional wild habitats such as homesteads, grasslands, and wetlands, have nowhere to go.
These heavy human-use areas are changing character rapidly. Every two weeks, fresh conflicts with fishing cats are reported. There is no assessment on jungle cats, a species still too common to get attention.
But unlike the Scottish Wildcats, these cats cannot produce fertile hybrids nor do they have any natural hideout that can provide some respite from humans. These small cats are a few chapters behind the Scottish Wildcats in their fate.
