Pallas's cat

Name and taxonomy

Peter Simon Pallas, a German naturalist working for Russia, described the cat in 1776 from the country south of Lake Baikal. He placed it in Felis, as Felis manul. Manul is the cat's name in Mongolian, and Kyrgyz speakers say manol. The English name Pallas's cat came later, from William Thomas Blanford, who wished to honour the describer. Johann Friedrich von Brandt proposed the genus Otocolobus in 1842, and Reginald Innes Pocock accepted that rank in 1907.

Several regional forms were named over the years, including a reddish animal from the Kopet Dag mountains. Since 2017 the Cat Classification Task Force accepts only two subspecies. O. m. manul lives across the western and northern part of the range, from Iran to Mongolia. O. m. nigripectus lives in the Himalayas, from Kashmir east to Bhutan. GBIF still files the species under Felis, so both names appear in databases.

Evolution and relatives

The cat family began to split into its modern lines in Asia during the late Miocene. Nuclear DNA puts that radiation at about 14.45 to 8.38 million years ago. The Pallas's cat sits in the leopard cat lineage, beside the genus Prionailurus. Nuclear DNA suggests the two lines parted between 8.55 and 4.8 million years ago. Mitochondrial DNA gives a wider window, 9.4 to 1.46 million years, for its split from the Felis line.

The cat has no close living relative in its own genus, since Otocolobus holds a single species. Its round pupils appear elsewhere only in the puma, the jaguarundi and the cheetah among the smaller cats. That is probably a case of similar traits arising more than once, rather than close kinship. Its mitochondrial genome holds 16,672 base pairs, with 13 protein-coding genes.

Appearance

The Pallas's cat is stocky, short-legged and wrapped in the densest fur of any small cat. Head and body measure 46 to 65 centimetres, and the tail adds 21 to 31 cm. Adults weigh 2.5 to 4.5 kilograms, about the same as a domestic cat. The long coat can carry up to 9,000 hairs on each square centimetre. The underfur is about 40 millimetres long, and the guard hairs on the back reach 69 mm. All of that fur makes the animal look stout, plush and much larger than it is.

The coat is light grey with a pale yellow or reddish tint, and some hair tips are white or black. In winter the fur grows greyer and denser, and the markings fade. Two black lines run in a zigzag across each cheek, from the corner of the eye to the jaw. The lower back carries five to seven narrow dark bars. The grey tail has seven thin black rings and a black tip. The forehead is speckled with small black spots, and white fur circles the yellow eyes.

The skull is rounded, with a short nose, large forward-facing eye sockets and a broad cranium. The first upper premolar is missing, so the cat has 28 teeth. Its bite at the canine tip measures 155.4 newtons, which is strong for an animal this size. The legs are short and the claws are short, sharp and retractile.

Habitat and range

The Pallas's cat lives in a broad but patchy band across Central Asia. Records run from the Caucasus and the Iranian Plateau through the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. The range continues north through Mongolia to the Altai, the Sayan mountains and the Transbaikal steppe. GBIF holds records from 17 countries, though a few of those are zoo animals. Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan hold most of the records.

The cat favours rocky mountain grassland, shrub steppe, scree slopes and ravines. It avoids places where snow lies deeper than about 15 to 20 centimetres, because its short legs sink in loose snow. The central part of the range is dry steppe and semi-desert with low shrubs and tough grasses. Winter there can drop to minus 50 degrees Celsius, and the yearly swing in air temperature reaches 80 degrees. In Transbaikal it lives on mountain steppe at 600 to 800 metres, where less than 400 millimetres of rain falls each year.

On the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas it climbs far higher. Cats were seen among plateau pika colonies at 4,087 metres in western China. In Nepal, scat was found at 5,593 metres in Shey-Phoksundo National Park, the highest record for the species. Camera traps first photographed it in Nepal in 2012 and in Bhutan in the same year. In 2024 it turned up in Arunachal Pradesh, in the far east of the Indian Himalaya.

Diet and hunting

The Pallas's cat is a specialist hunter of small mammals. Pikas are the main prey across much of the range, joined by voles, gerbils, hamsters and ground squirrels. It also takes hares, small birds, beetles and grasshoppers when it finds them. In central Mongolia, droppings held mostly Daurian pika, Mongolian gerbil and silver vole. After a vole population boomed in Sükhbaatar Province between 2017 and 2020, Brandt's vole became the main food.

The cat cannot run well, so it does not chase. It stalks low and slow, using rocks and thin scrub as cover, then pounces from short range. It also waits in ambush at the mouth of a burrow, and it scoops rodents from shallow burrows with a paw. Hunting takes place mostly at dusk and in the early morning. A fish was once found in droppings from Gongga Mountain, which shows the cat will take what it can.

Behaviour and social life

The Pallas's cat lives alone outside the breeding season. Each cat holds a home range and marks it with scent, though in one captive group only the males sprayed. In central Mongolia, 29 radio-collared cats used 101 dens over two and a half years. Female ranges covered 7.4 to 125.2 square kilometres, and male ranges 20.9 to 207.0. A male's range took in the ranges of one to four females, and sometimes part of another male's. All ranges shrank in winter.

Dens are the centre of its life. It rests in caves, rock crevices and the old burrows of marmots, and it moves between dens every few weeks. Summer dens sat close to rocks with little direct sun, and winter dens lay nearer to ravines. Activity peaks at dawn and dusk from May to August, but the cats hunt by day from September to November. Where livestock grazes nearby, the cats are less active in daylight. On a cold clear morning a cat often sits in the sun outside its den.

Communication and senses

The Pallas's cat hunts mostly by sight. Its eyes face forward in large sockets, and the round pupils shrink to small discs in bright light. The low, wide-set ears let it look over a rock while keeping the top of its head almost hidden. This is probably why the ears sit where they do, since the cat lives in open country with little cover.

Like other cats, it marks its range with urine and with droppings left in the open. Mating in late winter is noisy, with frequent calls between the pair. Otherwise the cat is quiet, and it relies on stillness and its grey coat to avoid notice. The flat face and staring eyes give it a fierce look, though the expression has nothing to do with mood.

Reproduction and life cycle

Females can breed at about one year old. Mating takes place in February and March. A female is receptive for only 26 to 42 hours, so the pair must find each other quickly. Gestation lasts 66 to 75 days. In captivity a male's testosterone rose to three times its normal level during the breeding season, from September to December.

Kittens are born between late April and late May in a den among rocks or in an old marmot burrow. A litter holds two to six kittens. Newborns are fuzzy and blind, and the eyes open at about two weeks. A zoo-born male kitten weighed 89 grams at birth and measured 12.3 centimetres. By two months a kitten weighs 500 to 600 g and the coat is growing long.

Mothers in Mongolia used their maternal dens for 4 to 60 days, and every such den had at least two entrances. Kittens begin to hunt at about five months and reach adult size at six to seven months. Wild cats live short lives. Animal Diversity Web gives an average of about 2.3 years in the wild, with most deaths in winter. The record in captivity is 11.5 years.

Predators and threats

Herding dogs kill Pallas's cats in Iran, Kazakhstan and the Altai Republic. Red foxes, corsac foxes, wolves and large birds of prey also take them. The cat cannot outrun anything, so it probably survives by hiding and by staying close to a den.

People were once the biggest danger. China, Mongolia and Russia each took more than 10,000 skins a year at the peak of the fur trade. Mongolia alone exported 9,185 skins in 1987, and international trade stopped the next year. Skins and body parts are still sold inside Mongolia for traditional medicine, and hunting there remains legal. Cats also die in traps set for small mammals, and poachers still operate in Transbaikal.

The subtler threat is poison. Rodent control campaigns in Mongolia used the poison bromadiolone in the early 2000s, and it killed the prey of cats and raptors. On the Tibetan Plateau, 54,147 square kilometres of grassland were poisoned between 2005 and 2009. That removed an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 tonnes of pika from the food chain. Mining and new roads break the habitat into pieces.

Population and conservation

The IUCN has listed the Pallas's cat as Least Concern since 2020. The reason is a wide range and a global population that is assumed to be large, not counted. Earlier assessments placed it at Near Threatened. It sits on CITES Appendix II, which controls international trade. Every range country except Mongolia bans hunting, and Afghanistan added full protection in 2009.

National lists tell a less settled story. Mongolia's Red List has called it Near Threatened since 2006, and China lists it as Endangered. Turkmenistan may list it as Critically Endangered, because recent records there are so scarce.

Zoos have kept the species since the early 1950s. The Beijing Zoo kept 16 cats between 1951 and 1979, but none lived longer than three years. Kittens in American zoos died at a very high rate in their first 30 days, the worst figure for any small wild cat. A parasite, Toxoplasma, is thought to be the main cause, because wild cats rarely meet it. By 2018, 177 Pallas's cats lived in 60 zoos across Europe, Russia, North America and Japan. The first artificial insemination succeeded at Cincinnati Zoo in 2011 and produced four kittens.

Relationship with humans

Wild Pallas's cats and people rarely meet. The cat lives in thinly settled steppe and mountain country, and it hides at the first sign of a person. It poses no danger to people or to livestock. Herders come across it most often when a dog corners one or when a cat shelters in a stock corral.

The fur trade drove most of the historical contact. Pelts were shipped by the tens of thousands from China, Mongolia and the Soviet Union until protection arrived in the 1970s. Today the trade is small and mostly domestic. The species is unsuited to life as a pet. It stresses easily, it needs cold and dry conditions, and its kittens fall ill in captivity.

Research began late. Field biologists did not radio-collar wild cats until the study in central Mongolia between 2005 and 2007. Camera traps have since added records from Nepal, Bhutan, Iran and India. Protected areas across the range now use the cat in outreach, since a healthy cat population means a healthy pika population.

In culture and myth

In Mongolian tradition the manul is a creature of the rocks. Village tales describe a rock ghost of the steppe, an animal that slips away from a hunter or leads him off his path. Herder songs from the same region cast the cat as a spirit guardian of mountain passes. In Central Asia its fur was said to bring good luck, and felt hats once carried a patch of manul fur as a charm. A legend from the Altai ties the name to Mani, a mother figure who made the world.

The cat has a second life on the internet. A Russian meme from 2008 showed a Pallas's cat with a caption that dared the reader to pet it. In 2012 the Moscow Zoo made the cat its mascot. Footage of a zoo cat named Zelenogorsk resting its paws on its own tail spread widely online. Its flat face and heavy stare have made it the internet's grumpiest cat, a label that says more about people than about the animal.