Unique fishing cat's bad luck

The fishing cat, an amazing representative of the cat family, that likes to swim and gets food in water, was threatened with complete extermination due to the cat’s rather small size and the poor awareness of the people in the South Asian countries, who do not distinguish this fishing cat from ordinary ones and kill ‘just to be on the safe side’ and protect their poultry-houses.

According to the representatives of the Bangladesh’s environmental services, at least a dozen of these unique animals have died at the hands of farmers since the beginning of the year. A similar picture is throughout the region, where one of the smallest wild cats in Asia that desperately needs protection can be found in Nepal, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Cambodia. 

“The main obstacle to the conservation of the fishing cats is that they are practically unknown to the general public and potential sponsors who allocate funds to protect more catchy, visible species, such as tigers and rhinos,” said Aslam Majumder, Head of the Forest Department of the southwestern district of Bangladesh, Khulna. “Since the beginning of this year, 14 fishing cats have been killed in various villages of Bangladesh when they approached some human settlements in search of food.”

But the most serious threat that the fishing cat faces is a fast and irrevocable loss of the cat’s habitat, environmentalists say. The degradation, pollution and loss of water resources forced the fishing cat to exercise ingenuity while searching food and approach closer and closer to the settlements. Studies have shown that fish makes up about 76 percent of the normal food of this agile animal, however, when it becomes impossible to get fish in a shallow pond, the cat has to shift focus to land inhabitants, including poultry, which automatically makes people chase down these small hunters. And this trend is growing - according to the World Wildlife Fund, over 45 percent of the protected wetlands and 94 percent of the globally significant ones in the South and Southeast Asia are under the threat of destruction.

Fishing cats mainly live on the shores of water bodies, they are usually seen (if they can be found at all) in the dense grass of swamps, reed beds, around lakes, streams, deep in the mangroves and wetlands scattered throughout India, Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and -possibly - Java.  

This is a grayish-brown cat with black spots and stripes stretching along the back to the tail and resembles a civet, by the name of which the fishing cat got its Latin generic name. The weight of an adult animal can reach 15 kg with a body length of up to 120 cm. The cat is strongly-built, has a short tail, a round head with a short wide neb and low-set ears. The narrow nose bridge gives the cat a rather funny look. The forepaws are webbed, which prevents the cat from retracting claws completely and helps to fish.

The ‘diet’, as the name implies, consists mainly of fish, and while fishing, a cat slaps on the water with its paw, imitating the movement of fallen insects to attract the fish. If necessary, whiskered fishing cats diversify their menu with birds, snakes, frogs, insects and land mammals, such as civets and rodents. Of course, they do not ignore domestic birds - ducks and chickens, which leads to big problems. As a result of such a double press on their population - reducing the habitat and extermination by villagers, there are no more than 3,000 fishing cats left in the wild, according to the most optimistic estimates.