🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview reviews human-tiger conflict involving Amur (Siberian) tigers in the Russian Far East and northeast China, a low-density, cold-forest population. It synthesises studies of livestock and…

Gonadotropin-releasing hormone and its agonists are used to induce ovulation in cats by stimulating the pituitary to release luteinizing hormone, substituting for the natural mating stimulus. This ove…

Many of the most important felid diseases, from distemper to leukemia virus to Toxoplasma, originate at the interface of domestic animals, wildlife and people, making them quintessential One Health pr…

Cities concentrate food in forms that wildlife can exploit, from garbage and compost to pet food, livestock, abundant commensal rodents and feral animals, and these anthropogenic subsidies underpin ma…

Domestication reshaped cat behavior, reducing fear of humans and increasing tolerance and sociability, and genetics is beginning to reveal the underlying changes. This overview surveys evidence that s…

Selective breeding for a flat, shortened face in Persians and related breeds produces brachycephaly, and this overview surveys its welfare consequences. It examines how extreme facial conformation is…

Canine distemper virus (CDV) is a morbillivirus closely related to measles and rinderpest that has expanded its host range far beyond dogs to infect lions, tigers, leopards, hyenas, seals and many oth…

Canine distemper has emerged as a documented threat to the endangered Amur (Siberian) tiger, with several tigers exhibiting abnormal, fearless behavior, neurological signs and death attributable to CD…

A canine distemper virus outbreak caused substantial mortality in the lions of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem in the mid-1990s, a landmark event in wildlife disease ecology that demonstrated how a virus…

An overview of the quantitative tools used to predict how many large predators a reserve can sustain from its prey base, building on the prey-preference and prey-biomass approaches. These models estim…

Whether cats track whether a person is paying attention to them bears on their social cognition. This overview surveys experiments testing if cats adjust their behaviour according to a human's attenti…

Object-choice tasks, in which an animal must use a human pointing gesture to find hidden food, are a standard probe of social cognition. This overview surveys studies applying these tasks to cats, whi…

Namibia holds one of the world's largest cheetah populations, the majority living on commercial and communal farmland where conflict with livestock and game farmers is a primary threat. This overview…

This overview surveys human-cheetah conflict in Namibia, home to a large share of the world's cheetahs living largely outside protected areas on commercial and communal farmland. It reviews patterns o…

Cognition has been studied far less in cats than in primates, birds, or dogs, but a coherent picture is emerging across the felid family. This overview synthesises research on object permanence, spati…

Cats and dogs differ in how they handle water, and this overview reviews the comparison and its roots in feline biology. Cats, descended from desert-adapted ancestors, tend to have a lower thirst driv…

Dogs and cats represent contrasting domestication stories, and comparing them clarifies what domestication means. This overview surveys the differences: dogs descend from wolves through a long, intens…

Dogs are famed for their sense of smell, and comparing them with cats puts feline olfaction in perspective. This overview surveys estimates that cats possess a large but somewhat smaller repertoire of…

Complete mitochondrial genomes have been sequenced for most cat species, providing a standardized dataset for phylogenetics, phylogeography, and species identification. This overview surveys the assem…

Several studies have tested how well cats exploit human-given cues, such as pointing, gazing, or tapping, to find hidden food in object-choice tasks. This overview surveys the range of cues cats can a…

Studies of leopard diet around Mumbai and across rural Maharashtra consistently find heavy reliance on domestic animals, particularly free-ranging dogs, alongside livestock, feral pigs, rodents and sm…

Leopards have perhaps the broadest diet of any large cat, recorded eating a vast array of species from large antelope to rodents, birds, reptiles, and invertebrates. This overview synthesizes scat and…

Snow leopards inhabit remote high mountains, yet they are not isolated from disease, facing exposure to pathogens shared with domestic animals and prey across their range. This overview surveys what i…

Living alongside domestic cats, dogs and people exposes Cape Town caracals to pathogens and parasites that can affect their health. This overview synthesises serological and disease-ecology research o…

For a population as small as the Amur leopard's, infectious disease poses a potentially catastrophic risk, as a single outbreak could affect a large fraction of all wild individuals. This overview sur…

Tigers, reduced to small, fragmented populations, face disease as one of several extinction pressures, most notably canine distemper documented in Amur tigers. This overview surveys the spectrum of di…

This overview examines zoonotic and cross-species disease risks where leopards prey on free-ranging dogs near people, including canine distemper, rabies, and parasites. It synthesises research on path…

Beyond learning from other cats, researchers have asked whether cats can copy or learn from human demonstrators. This overview surveys exploratory studies, including reports that cats can be trained t…

Because domestic dogs often act as the reservoir feeding canine distemper into wild carnivores, vaccinating dogs around protected areas has become a key conservation tool. This overview surveys the lo…

Whether cats catch or respond to the emotions of others is an active research question. This overview surveys studies examining whether cats are affected by their owners' emotional states, respond to…