The Corsican Wildcat and The 'Purity' of The Scottish Wildcat

 Back in the 1990s and when I wrote my 2000 wildcat and Ferals paper I had been told by zoologists that there was no such thing as a Corsican wildcat. In 2019 there was confirmation that such a cat did exist.

Here is a photo of the Corsican wildcat aka fox-cat (foxes are known as the cat-like canid and if you have observed them you know why) and a New York Post and a couple of other articles suggested it was a fox-cat hybrid. I assume that all these reporters purchased degrees as they have no brains.

Is it wrong for me to want tpo poke my tongue out at those zoologists?

Part of my research also included the "non existent" Irish wildcat but that is a matter for another day as my theory on the Corsican and Irish wildcats appears to have been correct.

But what about British wildcats -and I do not mean Scottish wildcats solely but wildcats from England and wales that are a rarity to find taxidermy of?  They seem to have had similar habits and habitats to Scottish wildcats but were the English and Welsh cats separate genetic types or were all wildcats from the same stock but varying based on habitat? 

We know that by 1790 both the naturalists and close observers of wildlife (mainly because it was mportant o know what you were killing) declared that if it were not for the inter-breeding of wildcats and feral domestics the wildcat species might well have been extinct long before. For hundreds (at least) of years and possibly longer feral domestic cats have introduced new blood into wildcats and the current view that every feral cat seen must be killed to "safeguard the purity of the species" is unscientific and based on pure dogma handed down over generations who had not really done the field-work or research.

I declared all ofthis in my 2000 paper and science appears to be jumping on board the flag-ship Hooper (oh, I wish I had an ego!), in the 2001 paper Genetic Identification of Wild and Domestic Cats (Felis silvestris) and Their Hybrids Using Bayesian Clustering Methods which zoologists and those involved with "preserving wildcat purity" appear to totally ignore or turn a blind eye to we read:

"The European wildcats used in this study were sampled from across the entire species' distribution range in Italy. Only 1 (Fsi284) of 48 genotyped European wildcats had admixed ancestry and was probably a hybrid with the domestic cat. Moreover, three additional putative European wildcats (Fsi70, Fsi73, and Fsi285) showed mtDNA haplotype Fca9, which was shared with three domestic cats. In both minimum-spanning network and NJ trees, haplotype Fca9 appears to be related to other domestic cat haplotypes and not to wildcat haplotypes (figs. 3 and 4 ). Therefore, although mtDNA haplotypes did not convey strong phylogenetic information, it is probable that Fca9 is a domestic cat haplotype. Nevertheless, the Bayesian assignment procedure classified Fsi70, Fsi73, and Fsi285 as European wildcats. The putative hybrid cat Fsi284 might derive from recent crossbreeding, while cats Fsi70, Fsi73, and Fsi285 could have a more ancient ancestry with domestic cats. Cats Fsi70, Fsi285, and Fsi284 were collected in Tuscany Maremma, on the Thyrrenian (western) coast of central Italy, and cat Fsi73 came from a central Apennines area geographically very close to Maremma. These localities map on the northernmost edge of the zoogeographical range of F. silvestris silvestris in Italy (fig. 1 ), which is thought to have been stable from the end of the last glaciation (Ragni et al. 1994 ), and were historically densely settled by humans and by potentially free-ranging domestic cats.

"These findings suggest that despite a long period of sympatry and syntopy, hybridization is negligible and is limited to particular areas at the geographical and ecological edges of the wildcat distribution in central Italy. However, more samples, and probably more microsatellite loci, should be analyzed to obtain quantitative estimates of the rate of crossbreeding in the Italian wildcat population. The microsatellites used in this study are widely spaced on the same chromosome or on separate chromosomes (Menotti-Raymond et al. 1999 ). Backcrossing of first-generation hybrids into the wildcat population will dilute the proportion of domestic parental genotypes through the generations, and linkage disequilibrium will be negligible after a few generations of backcrossing. Therefore, except for the introgressed nonrecombining mtDNA, evidence of episodic hybridization in the past might have been lost, and the identification of past hybridization might require an exponentially increasing number of molecular markers (Goodman et al. 1999 ). Thus, the existence of distinct groups of wildcats (European and African wildcats) does not necessarily mean that we have identified “pure” populations with no introgression, but rather that we have identified cats that show little evidence of recent domestic cat ancestry."

But even so there is the end note about keeping and protecting any pure populations -if they can somehow be identified. It is very unlikely that there are any true "pure" wildcats and natural evolution means that feral cats are providing new blood -the mass felicide of wildcats across the UK and still ongoing (despite alleged protection) killing by poisoning, shooting and snaring of F. silvestris means that humans need to take full responsibility (as they should for the extinction of Old Foxes) and step back and let evolution save the wildcat. If any pure wildcats exist they would be very rare and New wildcats (hybrids or not) are still genuine wildcats.