Ocelot オセロット

The ocelot is a medium-sized wild cat of the forests of the southern United States and Latin America. Its coat of black-edged markings linked like chains once made it a major target of the fur trade. Regulation of international trade greatly reduced hunting for fur, but habitat loss continues. The Ocicat breed is a domestic cat named for its resemblance to the ocelot; no ocelots or other wild cats were used to develop it.

It is a medium-sized cat with a head-and-body length of 50–101 cm and a weight of about 8–15 kg. Black-edged blotches and stripes linked like chains cover a pale yellow, tawny or grey coat, and the throat and belly are white. Its paws are broad, and the front paws are especially large.

It is mainly active at night, dawn and dusk. It feeds mainly on rodents and marsupials such as opossums, and also eats larger rodents such as agoutis and pacas, monkeys, reptiles and fish. About 90% of the prey animals it catches weigh less than 1 kg, but by the amount eaten, larger prey such as agoutis and pacas are also important. Gestation lasts about 66–83 days, litters are of 1–4 kittens, and young become independent at about two years.

It is found from southern Texas in the United States through Mexico and Central America to northern Argentina and southern Brazil in South America. It does not occur in Chile. The 2017 classification tentatively recognizes two subspecies: L. p. pardalis in Central America and L. p. mitis in South America.

It prefers dense vegetation such as evergreen forest and waterside thickets, and also lives in mangroves and seasonally flooded savanna. It is found mainly below 1,200 m but has been recorded at 3,800 m.

The Ocicat breed began in the United States in 1964 with a spotted kitten unexpectedly born during a breeding programme involving Abyssinians and Siamese; American Shorthairs were added later. It was named for its resemblance to the ocelot, but no ocelots or other wild cats were used to develop it.

It is listed as Least Concern (LC) on the IUCN Red List, but its population is thought to be decreasing. From the early 1960s to the 1980s it was hunted for fur, with more than 560,000 skins traded legally. It is now listed in CITES Appendix I, and international commercial trade is prohibited in principle. The main threats are habitat destruction and fragmentation, road traffic, and illegal trade and poaching.

It was described as Felis pardalis in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. The English name ocelot is thought to come from ōcēlōtl in Nahuatl, an Indigenous language of Mexico, a word that originally referred to the jaguar.