Hayling Island Jungle Cat Encounter
Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 20th, 2009
Darren Naish writes:
Over the weekend I had a mystery cat encounter of my own: I got to see and photograph the famous Hayling Island Jungle cat.
Naish, at his site, notes:
One of the neatest things in the collection (from my entirely tetrapodocentric perspective of course): it’s the Hayling Island Jungle cat, here being held [image below] by senior keeper of natural sciences Dr Chris Palmer. The Jungle cat or Swamp cat Felis chaus is an Old World felid that occurs from Egypt in the west to southern China in the east. It’s not native to Europe, at least not nowadays. So, when one was run over and killed by a car on Hayling Island, Hampshire, in July 1988, most people were surprised. Another dead one was found in 1989 near Ludlow, Shropshire: back injuries and an underweight condition led to the suggestion that it had starved after being injured by a car (Shuker 1995a, b). British cryptozoologist Karl Shuker now owns this specimen.
Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology site considers the question, “What are Jungle cats doing at large in the UK?”
What cryptid cats are in your collection? What Mystery Cat specimens exist around the world in private and public museums?
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Loren Coleman no longer writes for Cryptomundo. His archived posts remain here at Cryptomundo.
That’s pretty neat, shame he couldn’t get a snap with the plastic off, though.
Very interesting, indeed.
That is a good question though:
What ARE Jungle cats doing in the UK?
Probably from private collections.
Could also be previously undetected species. Who knows…
I strongly believe that Felis chaus and not F. sylvestris is the primary ancestor of Siamese and other oriental-type cats. Both species have been kept as semi-tame ratters for millennia, and, physically, Siamese have much in common with F. chaus.
What ARE jungle cats doing in the UK? Apparently, living wild
.
They may be remnants of populations that have lived wild there all along; jungle cats have a wide range that within historic times has included Eurasia and northern Africa. Or they may have come from private collections initially, but living and breeding in the wild now. It does seem that if they had been there all along, someone would have recorded them as endemic wildlife at some point. But cats of all stripes are elusive, so maybe they have gone unnoticed until now, especially if they are rare.
I should have said,
“jungle cats have a wide range that within historic times has included parts of Eurasia and northern Africa.”