Research overview: personality and temperament in the management of captive wild felids

Individual cats differ consistently in boldness, fearfulness, aggressiveness and sociability, and these stable traits affect welfare, breeding success and how animals respond to husbandry. This overview surveys methods for assessing personality in captive wild felids, including keeper rating questionnaires and behavioural coding tests, and how temperament data inform management decisions such as enclosure assignment, pairing for breeding, enrichment selection and predicting vulnerability to stress. It discusses landmark work in cheetahs and clouded leopards linking temperament to breeding, the heritable and developmental origins of personality, and the value of matching care to individuals rather than treating a species as uniform. The synthesis frames personality assessment as a practical, increasingly standard welfare and breeding tool.