Research overview: estimating body weight and drug dosing in wild felids

Accurate drug dosing for field immobilization depends on estimating the body weight of an unweighable free-ranging felid, a source of significant error that can lead to underdosing, with dangerous incomplete immobilization, or overdosing, with excessive depth and risk. Field workers rely on visual estimation, species and sex norms, and experience, and protocols build in margins of safety. This overview compiles the wildlife-pharmacology literature rather than one citation, describing how weight estimation errors propagate into dosing, why drugs with wide safety margins and reversibility are favored to buffer this uncertainty, and how supplemental dosing is managed when initial darts underdose. It matters because the practical impossibility of pre-weighing wild cats makes robust, forgiving dosing strategies central to safe field immobilization.