Zoo Hopes to Help Save Rarest Cats

Two pairs of the nearly extinct Arabian wildcats have been brought from Abu Dhabi to San Diego with the hope of establishing a breeding program to replenish the species, said John Becker, executive director of the Ohio-based International Society for Endangered Cats.

One pair is at the San Diego Zoo, where they will be in quarantine for 30 days. The other two were taken to the Society of Scientific Care in Valley Center, where they will be quarantined until Tuesday, Becker said. The animals arrived in San Diego Thursday.

The quarantine is standard procedure when bringing foreign animals into the country, said Georgeanne Irvine, spokeswoman for the San Diego Zoo. “We have to make sure they are healthy . . . so they don’t bring anything unusual to the animals we have here,” she said.

The four animals, which have been held at a research facility in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates since 1983, constitute one-quarter of the remaining 16 desert cats. About the size of a domestic house cat, “they are the rarest cat on Earth,” Becker said. “They look a lot like an Abyssinian domestic cat.”

West German scientists at the facility became concerned that, if a disaster occurred, the entire cat subspecies would be destroyed, and they contacted Becker about the possibility of breeding the animals in the Western Hemisphere.

“The goal of ISEC is to breed the various cats that are endangered . . . and build their numbers back up as a barrier against extinction,” Becker said. Pairs of wildcats also have been taken both to East and West Germany for breeding, he added.

An ancestor of the domestic cat, the Arabian wildcat has become endangered because of habitat encroachment and interbreeding with its domestic relatives. “Because they are so closely related, they allowed interbreeding and produced hybrids which are no longer pure wildcats, and the domestic cats overwhelmed their gene pool,” Irvine said.

Although the species are distant relatives, Becker said, “the irony is that while these are the ancient ancestors of the domestic cat, it is because of the domestic cat that they’re now being lost as a pure subspecies.”