Black-footed cat

Name and taxonomy

The British explorer William John Burchell named the species Felis nigripes in 1824. He worked from skins of small spotted cats that he saw near Dithakong in the northern Karoo of South Africa. The Latin name means black-footed cat. Some books call it the small-spotted cat, and GBIF also lists the Afrikaans name anthill tiger.

In 1931 Guy Shortridge proposed a darker subspecies, thomasi, from Griqualand West. No geographical barrier separates the darker cats from the paler ones, so the split has always been doubtful. In 2017 the IUCN Cat Specialist Group concluded that the species is most probably monotypic, with no subspecies at all. Reginald Pocock of the Natural History Museum in London confirmed that it belongs in the genus Felis with the domestic cat.

Evolution and relatives

The cat family began to spread out in Asia in the Miocene, between 14.45 and 8.38 million years ago, according to nuclear DNA. The genus Felis split from its common ancestor about 4.44 to 2.16 million years ago. The jungle cat branched off first, and the black-footed cat came next. That makes it one of the oldest lines among the small cats that include the wildcat, the sand cat and the domestic cat.

No fossil of the species has ever been found. Its ancestors probably crossed from Asia into Africa in the Pleistocene, when low sea levels opened a land route. GBIF notes that its chromosomes differ clearly from those of other Felis species. In build it resembles the sand cat of the northern deserts, and some authors treat it as that species' southern counterpart.

Appearance

A female measures 33.7 to 36.8 centimetres from head to rump, and a male 42.5 to 50 cm. The tail is short, 15 to 20 cm, about half the length of the body, and it ends in a black tip. Females weigh 1.1 to 1.65 kilograms and males 1.6 to 2.45 kg. The body is stocky, the head broad and round, and the ears are large, rounded and set wide apart. The eyes are light green to dark yellow, and the pupils close to a vertical slit like those of all Felis cats.

The ground colour varies from sandy through pale to dark ochre, and northern animals are paler. Black spots cover the whole body, and on the neck and back some spots stretch into stripes. Bold bands ring the shoulders and the upper legs, and two or three dark rings cross the throat. The belly is white or pale buff. The guard hairs are 25 to 30 millimetres long, grey at the base with white or dark tips, and the coat thickens in winter. The African wildcat is almost three times as large, with longer legs and plainer grey fur.

Habitat and range

The black-footed cat lives only in southern Africa, and its range is smaller than that of any other small cat there. Most records come from South Africa, with others from Namibia and southern Botswana. A few confirmed records exist from the far south of Angola and from southern Zimbabwe. It is unlikely to occur in Lesotho or Eswatini. GBIF holds records from 7 countries, which include zoo animals.

It favours open, dry savanna and semi-arid scrub with short grass, low bushes and scattered taller clumps. These areas receive 100 to 500 millimetres of rain a year. It avoids the driest dunes of the Namib and Kalahari, rocky ground and thick bush. In the Drakensberg it has been recorded at 2,000 metres. Shelter is the key need, and in one study 98% of 184 resting places were old springhare burrows.

Diet and hunting

The black-footed cat takes anything it can overpower. Researchers have identified 54 prey species, and the gerbil mouse is among the most important. Mammals make up about 72% of the prey mass and birds about 26%. The average prey item weighs 24.1 grams, but the cat also kills Cape hares heavier than itself. Frogs, lizards, snakes and insects such as termites and grasshoppers fill in the rest. It needs about 250 to 300 g of meat a night, roughly a sixth of its body weight.

It hunts every night, whatever the weather, in temperatures from minus 10 to 35 degrees Celsius. It uses three methods. In a fast hunt it bounds through cover at 2 to 3 kilometres per hour to flush prey. In a slow hunt it creeps through the grass at 0.5 to 0.8 km/h, turning its head from side to side. In a sit-and-wait hunt it crouches at a rodent hole, sometimes with its eyes shut, and opens them at the first sound.

In 1993 researchers followed a male and a female for 622 hours. The cats caught a vertebrate about every 50 minutes and killed up to 14 animals in a night. Of 10 attempts in five hours, about six succeeded. They stalked birds, then chased and jumped up to 1.4 metres high and 2 metres forward, and caught some in the air. Large birds were plucked, eaten over several hours and the remains buried under sand for later. The cat can get all its water from prey, but it drinks when it can.

Behaviour and social life

The black-footed cat is nocturnal and solitary. The only lasting company is a mother with her kittens, and a male and female meet for just five to ten hours to mate. It spends the day in a hollow termite mound or in the disused burrow of a springhare, aardvark or porcupine. It digs hard to widen or reshape these holes. At the slightest disturbance it bolts for cover, but when cornered it fights with real ferocity.

Unlike most cats it climbs badly, because a thickset body and a stubby tail give it little balance in trees. One cat was photographed resting in the low branches of a camelthorn, but that is rare. It moves fast across country and avoids roads and tracks, which makes it hard to survey. Adults cover about 8.42 kilometres a night, mostly in small circles and zigzags among the bushes and termite mounds.

A female uses a home range of 6.23 to 15.53 square kilometres over a year, and a resident male 19.44 to 23.61 km2. A male's range overlaps those of one to four females, but ranges of the same sex barely overlap. Densities are low. At Benfontein near Kimberley the estimate fell from 0.17 cats per km2 in 1998 to 1999 to 0.08 between 2005 and 2014. In poorer habitat the figure is probably closer to 0.03 per km2.

Communication and senses

A solitary cat talks mainly with scent. Both sexes spray urine, not only at the edge of the range but at spots they use often. One female in heat sprayed 41 times along 685 metres. A male can spray up to 585 times a night before mating. She sprays less when pregnant and not at all while raising kittens. Cats also rub objects, rake with their claws and leave faeces in open places.

It calls more loudly than other cats of its size, presumably so the sound carries across open country. A male seeking a mate gives a loud meow repeated up to ten times in a row. At close range it purrs or gurgles, and when threatened it hisses and growls. The ear openings and the bony ear chambers are larger than in most Felis cats, which sharpens hearing in bare country. Its eyesight is keen at dusk and in the dark.

Reproduction and life cycle

A female's cycle runs about 54 days, and she is in heat for around 36 hours. In the wild she accepts a male for only five to ten hours, so he must find her fast. The resident male guards her and fights any intruder, and the pair mate six to ten times. Pregnancy lasts 63 to 68 days. Kittens arrive in the southern summer, between October and March, and a female can raise two litters a year.

A litter holds one or two kittens, rarely up to four. Each weighs 60 to 93 grams at birth, blind but able to crawl within hours. The kittens open their eyes within three to ten days, walk at two weeks and take solid food within a month. The mother hunts again four days after the birth and may leave the den for up to 10 hours a night. She shifts the litter to a fresh hiding place every six to ten days, far more often than other small cats do. She brings live prey so the kittens can practise, and at times half of her night's catch goes to them.

Kittens are weaned at two months and independent at three to four months, but they stay in their mother's range for a while. In captivity females mature at seven months and males at nine. Wild animals are thought to reach 13 years. One captive cat lived 15.6 years.

Predators and threats

Kittens and young cats fall to black-backed jackals, caracals and the large eagle-owls of the region. Adults may be taken by the same hunters, and herding dogs have killed several. Disease is a major killer. Both wild and captive cats often develop AA amyloidosis, a build-up of protein that ends in kidney failure. Wild cats can also catch infections from domestic dogs and cats.

The greatest human threat is indirect. Farmers set poison baits and steel traps for jackals and caracals, and the black-footed cat, a ready scavenger, takes them too. Night shooting aimed at jackals kills cats in the central Karoo. Overgrazing, spreading farmland, bush encroachment and locust poisoning degrade its habitat. Hunting of springhares for bushmeat removes both prey and the burrows the cat sleeps in. Most protected areas are probably too small to hold a viable population.

Population and conservation

No one knows how many black-footed cats exist. The cat is so secretive that even radio-collared animals are hard to count. Densities in the best habitat reach about 0.17 per square kilometre, and elsewhere perhaps 0.03. The South African red data book lists it as rare, at about 8 adults per 60 km2 in the central Karoo. The IUCN lists it as Vulnerable, and populations appear fragmented and in decline.

The species sits on CITES Appendix I, which bans commercial trade, and the United States lists it as Endangered. Hunting it is illegal in South Africa and Botswana. Its range includes several national parks, among them Karoo, Addo Elephant and Mountain Zebra. The Black-footed Cat Working Group has radio-collared 65 cats between 1992 and 2018 at Benfontein and nearby farms. Camera traps watch the collared cats and their meetings with aardwolves.

Relationship with humans

Few people ever see a black-footed cat. It is harmless to livestock, because its prey is too small, and it bites only in self-defence. Farmers gain from it, since it kills the rodents that eat crops and carry disease. Its main conflict with people comes from poisons and traps set for other predators.

Zoos have kept the species since Wuppertal Zoo in Germany acquired cats in 1957 and bred them in 1963. A European breeding programme began in 1993, and by 2011 the studbook recorded 726 captive cats since 1964. In February 2011 two male kittens in Louisiana were the first of the species born from frozen sperm and frozen embryos. A year later a kitten named Crystal was born to a domestic cat that carried a black-footed cat embryo.

In culture and myth

In the Afrikaans tradition of the Karoo, the cat is the miershooptier, the anthill tiger. The name records both its habit of denning in termite mounds and its fury when cornered. In San tradition, a tale tells how this tiny cat brings down a giraffe with a bite to the throat. The tale is told to praise courage, not to describe a hunt.

Modern wildlife websites have made the cat famous as the deadliest cat in the world, because it succeeds in so many hunts. A San Diego Zoo article passes on a local saying: it has the character of a tiger. The black-cat superstitions of Europe and Egypt concern domestic cats and probably have nothing to do with this species.