🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview synthesises research on the social and ecological factors influencing herder attitudes toward snow leopards and wolves across the trans-Himalaya, emphasising that tolerance is shaped at…

Modern exhibit design aims to provide not just naturalistic appearance for visitors but genuine behavioural opportunity for animals. This overview surveys principles of felid exhibit design: complex,…

Where several large cats share a landscape, they coexist by partitioning resources along axes of prey size, habitat, and activity. This overview synthesizes research across continents showing how tige…

Behavioral observations and field sign surveys describe how ocelots advertise territory and reproductive state through scent. This overview draws together accounts of urine spraying, fecal deposition…

Stimulating the ovaries with exogenous gonadotropins to produce multiple follicles is a key step in collecting eggs or preparing females for insemination in cats. This overview surveys ovarian stimula…

A challenging finding for felid welfare management is that stereotypic pacing, once established, can persist even after enclosures are enriched or enlarged, becoming partly independent of its original…

This overview reviews efforts to reinforce nighttime livestock corrals across snow leopard range to prevent the catastrophic multiple-kill events that occur when a cat enters an open pen and kills man…

Puma home ranges vary widely with prey density, terrain, and sex, among the largest of any solitary cat in prey-poor environments. This overview synthesizes telemetry studies showing that male pumas o…

This overview examines how researchers reconstruct the hunting behaviour of the cave lion from anatomy, isotopes, prey associations, and prehistoric art. Skeletal proportions indicate a powerful ambus…

Rotational exhibit systems allow multiple species or individuals to take turns occupying a series of connected spaces, multiplying the effective territory and novelty available to each animal. This ov…

An overview comparing the two principal ways of determining what cats eat, analysis of prey remains in scats and investigation of kill sites, and their complementary strengths and biases. Scat analysi…

Infanticide by males is documented or inferred across many felid species, from lions to tigers, leopards, pumas, and others, wherever killing dependent young can hasten a female's next conception. Thi…

Across the high mountains of Asia, snow leopards prey on domestic sheep, goats, and yaks, creating conflict with herding communities whose livelihoods depend on their animals. This overview surveys re…

This overview synthesises studies of snow leopard predation on livestock across the mountains of Central and South Asia, from Ladakh and Spiti to the Pamirs and Mongolia. It reviews patterns of loss,…

Domestic cats are facultatively social and did not evolve to share territory with unrelated individuals, so multi-cat households can generate chronic social stress that manifests as behaviour and heal…

Many homes keep several cats, but because cats are facultatively social and territorial, cohabitation can generate chronic stress. This overview surveys research on the welfare challenges of multi-cat…

Where multiple cat species coexist, smaller felids often adjust their use of space and time to avoid larger, dominant competitors, and camera-trap data are a primary means of detecting these interacti…

Pumas, also called cougars or mountain lions, are solitary felids whose social lives revolve around spatial organisation maintained largely through scent communication. This overview surveys GPS and f…

Whether a cat population is a species or a subspecies depends heavily on which species concept is used. This overview compares the biological species concept (reproductive isolation), the phylogenetic…

String-pulling tasks, in which an animal must pull a string to obtain attached food, test understanding of means-end connections and physical relations. This overview surveys research with cats on sin…

A feline version of the Glasgow composite measure pain scale was developed to assess acute pain in cats through observation of behaviors and responses, including facial expressions, providing another…

The pampas cat, Leopardus colocola, shows dramatic variation in coat color and pattern across its wide South American range, fueling long debate over whether it is one variable species or several. Thi…

The Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network pioneered standardized, long-term camera-trap monitoring of terrestrial mammals and birds across multiple tropical forest sites worldwide.…

The UNESP-Botucatu multidimensional composite pain scale was developed and validated to assess acute postoperative pain in cats, combining behavioral observations, responses to palpation, and physiolo…

Consensus veterinary guidelines distil decades of feline welfare science into five environmental needs: a safe place to retreat; multiple and separated key resources; opportunity for play and predator…

This overview takes a deep-time perspective on the rise and fall of sabertooth cats, whose machairodont lineage flourished for more than ten million years before vanishing in the late Pleistocene. Aft…

This overview explains the reasoning the Cat Classification Task Force used to justify a major revision rather than incremental edits. It describes the decision rules adopted: recognize taxa only when…

How often a tiger must kill depends on prey size, the cat's body mass, reproductive state, and competition at carcasses. This overview synthesizes GPS-cluster and observational studies estimating that…

Tiger reserves, especially in India, embody a particular protected-area model built around strictly protected cores surrounded by multiple-use buffer zones, often combined with voluntary relocation of…

The Sundarbans straddle India and Bangladesh, so safeguarding its tigers against climate change requires coordinated cross-border action. This overview surveys how the two nations monitor and manage t…