🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Diseases of the reproductive tract, such as the uterine infection pyometra, affect fertility and welfare in domestic and nondomestic cats. This overview surveys reproductive tract pathology in felids,…

Qualitative Behaviour Assessment asks trained observers to score the expressive demeanour of an animal, capturing emotional qualities such as relaxed, tense, content or frustrated that quantitative et…

Assessing how good a cat's life is requires validated tools, and this overview surveys the development of quality-of-life and welfare assessment instruments for cats. It covers questionnaires and clin…

Deciding when a chronically ill or aged big cat's welfare no longer justifies continued life is among the most difficult tasks in captive felid care. This overview surveys structured quality-of-life a…

Assessing quality of life in aging and chronically ill cats is an important but challenging aspect of geriatric care, and structured tools and frameworks have been developed to help owners and veterin…

Numerical cognition has been studied extensively in birds and primates, and a smaller body of work asks whether cats discriminate quantities. This overview surveys experiments testing whether cats can…

Vaccines against feline immunodeficiency virus exist for domestic cats but raise complex questions when considered for wild felids harboring their own endemic lentiviruses. This overview surveys the i…

The Iberian lynx is a rabbit specialist, and the collapse of European rabbit populations from the viral diseases myxomatosis and rabbit hemorrhagic disease was a central driver of the lynx's near-exti…

The Iberian lynx is a hyperspecialist on European rabbit, so rabbit population crashes from rabbit hemorrhagic disease (RHDV, including the RHDV2 variant) and myxomatosis directly threaten the cat. Th…

Rabies, an almost invariably fatal lyssavirus infection, occasionally strikes wild felids exposed through bites from infected dogs, jackals or other wildlife reservoirs. This overview surveys document…

Effective rabies control depends on surveillance that spans the carnivore community, since the virus circulates among dogs, jackals, mongooses, foxes and bat reservoirs that all interface with felids.…

Rabies vaccination of cats protects both feline and human health given the lethal, zoonotic nature of the disease, and is legally required in many jurisdictions. Research on duration of immunity suppo…

Radioactive iodine (I-131) therapy is widely regarded as the gold-standard treatment for feline hyperthyroidism because it selectively destroys overactive thyroid tissue while sparing normal tissue, o…

This overview surveys efforts to date the Rancho La Brea deposits and place their sabertooth fossils in time. Because the asphalt pits accumulated remains over tens of thousands of years and because p…

This overview examines how radiocarbon dating is applied to the bones of late Pleistocene cats to reconstruct their chronologies and last appearances. Directly dating individual fossils of Smilodon, c…

Before estimating a home range, one must verify that the animal actually has one, that its movement is range-resident rather than dispersing, migrating, or nomadic. This overview describes diagnostic…

Beyond the Sundarbans, tigers across Asia face varied climate exposure layered onto severe habitat loss, prompting range-wide vulnerability thinking. This overview surveys how climate projections, sea…

The jaguar's continuous historical range once stretched from the southwestern United States to Argentina, and maintaining connectivity across this expanse is a central conservation goal. This overview…

The effectiveness of protected areas for big cats rests heavily on rangers, yet many reserves are chronically understaffed and underfunded. This overview surveys research quantifying the resources nee…

Rangers are not only enforcers but also data collectors, and ranger-based monitoring uses their patrols to gather information on wildlife, threats, and law-enforcement effort. This overview surveys re…

This overview synthesises the role of specialised rapid-response teams in managing human-tiger conflict, from Village Tiger Response Teams in the Sundarbans to forest-department units across India and…

A central question in distemper ecology is how a virus historically associated with dogs repeatedly jumps into cats. This overview surveys research on the molecular basis of canine distemper virus hos…

Cats form bonds with specific people, and research has probed how they recognise their humans. This overview surveys evidence that cats identify owners primarily through voice, as shown in vocal-recog…

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…

This overview surveys efforts to reconstruct how Panthera atrox looked, including the contentious question of whether males bore a mane like modern African lions. Because the American lion descends fr…

Researchers and illustrators have attempted to simulate feline color perception by combining dichromatic cone data with measured acuity. This overview surveys those reconstructions, which typically re…

Outdoor recreation brings people deep into wildlife habitat, and this overview examines how hiking, biking, and trail use affect puma movement and space use. Telemetry studies show that pumas often av…

Aggression in cats takes several forms, and redirected aggression, in which a cat aroused by one stimulus attacks a nearby individual, is among the most disruptive in homes. This overview surveys rese…

Veterinary visits are a major source of acute stress for cats and a barrier to care, since fearful cats are harder to examine and owners may avoid appointments. This overview surveys the science and p…

Although jaguars are best treated as a single species, they do show some geographic genetic structure relevant to conservation. This overview surveys studies documenting differentiation across the jag…