The wild cat ranges from the far north of Scotland, across Europe and Northern Asia, to the northern slopes of the Himalaya. It has always been known as one of the fiercest and wildest of the cats, large or small. The continual ill-temper of these creatures is remarkable. In the experience of the keepers of menageries there is no other so intractably savage. One presented to the Zoological Gardens by Lord Lilford some eight years ago still snarls and spits at any one who comes near it, even the keeper.
[Illustration: _By permission of Percy Leigh Pemberton, Esq._
The British representative of this species is rapidly becoming extinct. The specimen whose portrait is given here was caught in Argyllshire.]
The food of the wild cat is grouse, mountain-hares, rabbits, small birds, and probably fish caught in the shallow waters when chance offers. It is wholly nocturnal; consequently no one ever sees it hunting for prey. Though it has long been confined to the north and north-west of Scotland, it is by no means on the verge of extinction. The deer-forests are saving it to some extent, as they did the golden eagle. Grouse and hares are rather in the way when deer are being stalked; consequently the wild cat and the eagle are not trapped or shot. The limits of its present fastnesses were recently fixed by careful Scotch naturalists at the line of the Caledonian Canal. Mr. Harvie Brown, in 1880, said that it only survived in Scotland north of a line running from Oban to the junction of the three counties of Perth, Forfar, and Aberdeen, and thence through Banffshire to Inverness. But the conclusion of a writer in the _Edinburgh Review_ of July, 1898, in a very interesting article on the survival of British mammals, has been happily contradicted. He believed that it only survived in the deer-forests of Inverness and Sutherlandshire. The wild cats shown in the illustrations of these pages were caught a year later as far south as Argyllshire. The father and two kittens were all secured, practically unhurt, and purchased by Mr. Percy Leigh Pemberton for his collection of British mammals at Ashford, in Kent. This gentleman has had great success in preserving his wild cats. They, as well as others--martens, polecats, and other small carnivora--are fed on fresh wild rabbits killed in a warren near; consequently they are in splendid condition. The old "tom" wild cat, snarling with characteristic ill-humour, was well supported by the wild and savage little kittens, which exhibited all the family temper. Shortly before the capture of these wild cats another family were trapped in Aberdeenshire and brought to the Zoological Gardens. Four kittens, beautiful little savages, with bright green eyes, and uninjured, were safely taken to Regent's Park. But the quarters given them were very small and cold, and they all died. Two other full-grown wild cats brought there a few years earlier were so dreadfully injured by the abominable steel traps in which they were caught that they both died of blood-poisoning.