Animals Directory

Archive for the ‘Domestic cats’ Category

The world’s largest cats are predators too heavy, but other species like this, they are larger than many domestic cats. Its distribution area covers Europe, Middle East, South and Central Asia and much of Africa. The European form is distributed from the Caucasus and Asia Minor throughout central and southern Europe, reaching as far north as Scotland and near the North Sea and Baltic Sea. However, it was exterminated by humans in many parts of central Europe during the last century, and today is not in large numbers rather than in the Carpathians. The wild cat is protected for several years.

It is of robust constitution, the queue is populated and wider than the domestic cat, with a layer of thick hair, predominantly brown color, lighter and cretaceous in the belly and lower parts, with four longitudinal black stripes on his forehead will converge in a line that runs along the spine. She lives in forests, and places little degraded and removed from urban centers. feeds on small rodents and other small mammals, invertebrates, passersby, and small amphibians.

Character is elusive and solitary, territorial, evening and night, which seriously restricts its study. It is believed that the European population has been disappearing, but the difficulty of the study mentioned, leads to the IUCN Red List include it in a prudent but ambiguous threat.

The African wildcat is less shy than other subspecies of wild cat. Is thought to be the ancestor of all domestic cats.

Mating takes place in February and March and May, the calves are born in the crevices of rocks, in burrows of other mammals Abandon or in hollow trees. Outside the period that feeds her brood, the wild cat is a solitary animal whose territory may comprise about 2 km ². It can sometimes be confused with a domestic cat scratch naturalized brown coat, but in the case of the Eurasian forms can be distinguished by its bushy tail, more robust and wide, with blunt, rounded termination, with at least three black rings completely closed . The only indubitable morphological test for distinguishing the mountains of the domestic cat is the measurement of cranial capacity slightly higher in the first.