Leopard cat ベンガルヤマネコ

The leopard cat is a small wild cat found across South, Southeast and East Asia and into the Russian Far East. In Japan, the Tsushima leopard cat and the Iriomote cat are regarded as members of this species. It is best known as the wild ancestor of the Bengal, a domestic cat breed created by crossing it with house cats.

It looks like a miniature leopard, with long, slender legs. It has a round head and large, rounded ears whose backs are black with a white spot. Black spots are scattered over a pale yellowish-brown coat, the belly is white, and vertical stripes run from the forehead down the neck. Individuals from northern regions have longer, paler fur. Size varies greatly by region, with northern animals being larger.

It is mainly active at night and around dawn and dusk, and lives alone. It eats mostly rodents, but also hares, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects and even fish. It is a good swimmer and has settled on offshore islands, and it also climbs well. Gestation lasts about two months (56–70 days according to some sources), and females give birth to one to four kittens, usually two or three.

It ranges from South Asia through mainland Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula to Taiwan, eastern China, the Korean Peninsula and the Russian Far East. In Japan it lives on Tsushima and Iriomote islands. In the 2017 revision of cat taxonomy, the populations on the Sunda islands such as Java, Borneo and Sumatra were split off as a separate species, the Sunda leopard cat (Prionailurus javanensis).

It lives in a wide range of forests, from tropical rainforest to temperate broadleaf and coniferous forest, and also around farmland. It has been recorded from sea level to above 4,000 m.

The Bengal is a domestic cat breed developed over many generations from crosses between leopard cats and house cats. The first known deliberate cross was made in 1963, and after further breeding the international registry TICA accepted the Bengal as a new breed in 1986. The leopard cat is not, however, an ancestor of today’s house cats—house cats descend from the African wildcat of Africa and the Middle East.

Because it is widespread and numerous, it is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. Even so, it faces threats including habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting for fur and meat, snares, road traffic, the pet trade, and retaliation for attacks on poultry. It is listed in CITES Appendix II, with the populations of Bangladesh, India and Thailand in Appendix I.

It was described in 1792, based on an earlier account of an animal said to come from the coast of Bengal; the scientific name bengalensis means “of Bengal.” Long treated as a single species, it was split into two in the 2017 taxonomic revision by the IUCN Cat Specialist Group: the mainland leopard cat and the Sunda leopard cat.