Born to be wild

Once widespread across the British Isles, there are now fewer than 100 pure Scottish wildcats left. Joe Gibbs considers whether curiosity or interbreeding killed the ‘Highland tiger’

- Joe Gibbs

TOUCH, not the cat bott a glove,’ warns the motto of the confederation of smaller Highland clans that make up Clan Chattan. The moggie referred to is a wildcat and the advice, in plain English, is not to mess with one when its claws are out. The question today, however, isn’t so much what to do when in a tight corner with Felis sylvestris sylvestris, the Scottish version of the European wildcat, but where to find one in the first place.

There are estimated to be fewer than 100 specimens of Scotland’s apex predator left in the wild, concentrated in the northern and north-eastern Highlands, in Morven, and the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the western Highlands. Of these, none may be a pure wildcat, most carrying at least 25% domestic cat genes. Another few thousand more diluted hybrids and feral cats also exist outdoors.

'The advice, in plain English, is not to mess with a wildcat when its claws are out'

A hunter along the forest and moorland edge at the fringes of daylight, the wildcat needs extensive tracts of woodland or wild country to flourish. Once widespread over the whole of Britain, by the end of the 18th century, as agriculture tamed the land, wildcats were to be found only in the mountain fastness of the north. Yet the Highlands were to prove an unreliable sanctuary. In 1878, the naturalist and sportsman Charles St John observed that ‘the true wildcat is gradually becoming extirpated owing to the increasing preservation of game’ and, by 1914, it had almost disappeared.