Cats of the Wild

Beijing, China - the world's largest capital city was once the traditional habitat of the magnificent North Chinese leopard. Pushed out from Beijing, these leopards today live in the Taihung mountains in the south west of the capital, however an ambitious project from the China Felid Conservation Alliance seeks to bring these leopards back home to Beijing. Across successive generations, these...

Dive into the heart of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula where ancient traditions meet modern challenges. 🐝🌳 In our latest episode, we explore the tropical dry forests of Calakmul, a place where Mayan beekeepers have been harvesting honey in harmony with nature for centuries. But now, climate change is bringing an unexpected twist to the tale. With water becoming a precious commodity, a conflict br...

When we think about the illegal wildlife trade, we think of the fur of tigers, the ivory of elephant tusks and the scales of pangolins - but even small wild cats are traded illegally in many countries around the world. In the porous border region between Myanmar and the Indian state of Mizoram, wildlife biologist Amit Kumar Bal stumbled upon a trade of small wild cats from the Murlen National Park...

In 1965, Yukio Togawa, a Japanese novelist found himself drawn to the whispers of a wild cat unknown to science. He set sail for the untamed wilderness of Iriomote Island and brought this wild cat - the Iriomote Cat to the world's attention. Togawa inadvertently sparked a conversation about the future of Iriomote Island - a delicate balance between the unspoiled wilderness that needed protecti...

Wildfires have always been a natural hazard ingrained in the history of the forests across Washington state in the US Pacific Northwest, but in recent years their impact has grown more severe, with longer-lasting and more intense blazes pushing this region's fragile ecosystems right to the very brink. Amongst the wildlife that call these forests home, is a subpopulation of the Canada lynx, a m...

“Hey all you cool cats and kittens!”   Do you recognise this catch phrase at all? Of course you do, it's Carole Baskin - co-founder of the non-profit sanctuary Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Florida.   Whilst many people may have only recently heard about Big Cat Rescue through Netflix's 'Tiger King', the organisation has been caring and protecting wild cats for over thirty years. Carole...

The Carpathian lynx - a subspecies of the Eurasian lynx. These majestic cats are a symbol of the wild and rugged landscapes of east and central Europe, where from country to country, they roam the mountains and forests. silently hunting for their prey. Over in France, the fate of these cats is hanging by just a thread. In fact if we do nothing, it's likely they will become locally extinct in j...

Humans may be the world's top predator - but what happens when the tables are turned and we become the hunted. For many people around the world, the feeling of being watched stalked or even eaten by a predator such as a big cat is a terrifying reality. We're working to protect what wild cats we have left and even increase their numbers. But how do we balance this against the complexities of a worl...

Maybe you're driving on a road right now - even if you're not you're probably not that far from a road - because, roads are everywhere. It's hard to imagine a modern world without roads - and whilst they allow people like us to go almost anywhere in the world - they're also the great enabler for the many threats facing wild cats today such as deforestation, poaching and of course road-kill What we...

Singapore is one of the smallest countries on the planet, and its rapid rise from a small trading settlement to a bustling modern metropolis has destroyed 95% of its historical forests, driving the extinction of many species of animals. The islands were once home to the Malayan Tiger and the Indo-Chinese leopard and today, there is just one species of wild cat left in Singapore - the leopard cat -...

In Central & West Africa wildlife crime and corruption was rampant - and yet not a single individual had ever been prosecuted. It's in these fragile landscapes where lions are on the brink of extinction, leopards are under threat and other endangered species such as the western black rhino, gorillas and elephants could soon disappear. So when a young activist discovered the lack of any real en...

This episode is unlike any I've done before! We're taking a journey into computational science and mathematics and how the sand cat has inspired a new algorithm that could improve artificial intelligence, civil engineering, scheduling, smart routing, supply chains, and even aerospace engineering. My mind was blown when I read this research paper - and to be honest, it is an extraordinarily complex...

Mongolia - an epic expanse of rolling grasslands, unforgiving desert and rugged mountains. It's also the home of one of the more unusual wild cats on this planet - Pallas’s Cat or the manul. Since 2020, it's been been listed as "Least Concern" in the IUCN Red List - but if we look deeper, it's quickly evident that we do need to be concerned about the Pallas’s Cat - particularly in Mongolia. Today...

Borneo is a treasure trove of biodiversity and home to one of the oldest rainforests in the world. It’s also the epicentre of the palm oil industry and so these precious and fragile ecosystems have been ripped wide open, creating opportunity for disease transmission between wildlife, people and their domestic animals. So what does this mean for the endangered wild cats of Borneo like the Sunda Clo...

Over 6,000 kilometres from Moscow in the Far East of Russia is the remote and harsh habitat of the Amur Tiger - also known as the Siberian Tiger. It is one of the largest cats in the world, and there is estimated to be around 400 remaining in the wild. The largest threat for the Amur tiger is poaching - but there's really only one way to truly understand how and why poachers poach - and that's to...

One day in 2012, Rajan Choudhary, a naturalist from Bardia National Park in Nepal was guiding an American tourist in his jeep through the park. Game drives are common in this park with the park home to elephants, tigers, dolphins and many other species. It was late and as they were returning to the hotel - all of a sudden, in the distance on the right-hand side, about ten metres into the forest -...

On February 26, 2019 - the Big Cat Public Safety Act was introduced to the US House of Representatives - in its official summary, it's a bill that revises the restrictions on the possession and exhibition of big cats - species of lion, tiger, leopard, cheetah, jaguar, or cougar or any hybrid of such species, including to restrict direct contact between the public and big cats. The introduction of...

Happy New Year! Not a normal episode - just a quick thank you and how you can support Cats of the Wild! Get in touch @catsofthewildpodcast on Instagram or andy@wildmissions.com

Nepal - a mountain kingdom and home to twelve species of wild cat including the tiger, snow leopard and Eurasian Lynx but today we're talking about a small cat - the fishing cat in the Western Terai region of Nepal. Ganesh Puri is a wildlife and forest ranger - and he saw first-hand the conflict between the fishing communities of this area and the fishing cat - whose numbers are thought to be less...

The Sunda Tiger is one of two subspecies of tiger - and today they can only be found on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. There's less than four hundred left in Sumatra's forests and time is running out before they become extinct in the wild. As deforestation and illegal hunting continue throughout Sumatra, what hope is there for the long-term survival of the Sumatran Tiger? In this episode we cha...

Cattle and soy production are big business in Bolivia, and it's quickly reducing habitat for some incredible wildlife such as the jaguar, puma and ocelot. It's not easy though, because in Bolivia you also just can't buy land for the purposes of conservation - the land has to be productive and have an economic function. So this wildlife now needs to co-exist with agriculture and what often happens...

CATCrafts is a program from the Andean Cat Alliance that connects local communities not only with the conservation of the Andean Cat - but also with their past, culture and traditions. In this episode, Mauro Lucherini - General Coordinator of the CATCrafts program talks about the program, the role of community in conservation and how he is inspiring and training the next generation of conservation...

There's not too many people in the world with the job title of wild cat photographer. But in this episode, we're going to meet one of the world's best - Sebastian Kennerknecht. He’s photographed over twenty species of wild cat in their natural habitat and has teamed up with biologists all over the world to share their research and stories. Like a field biologist though, it's not a job for the fain...

Recently a friend sent me a photo on the Nat Geo Instagram account and said, “Hey, this could be a great story for your podcast”. It was a photo taken by Trevor Frost of Samantha Zwicker, a PhD student from the University of Washington with an ocelot deep in the Peruvian Amazon. I don't know if this was intended, but this photo really reminded me of that famous photo of Jane Goodall, touching the...

Around 12,000 years there was a mass extinction event that eliminated around 75% of the world's large mammals. It's still unclear exactly what caused this but it marked the end for legendary megafauna such as the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger. Remarkably, a handful of cheetahs survived this event, but it created a population bottleneck, resulting in an extreme reduction of their genet...