• Question: What do you think about Irish wildcats even if they have em

    Asked by iballisticksquid to Scottish Wildcat, Glow Worm, Barbastelle Bat on 21 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Scottish Wildcat

      Scottish Wildcat answered on 21 Nov 2017:

      Wildcats once lived all over the UK, but were persecuted to extinction by humans except in remote areas where humans could not live because the weather was too harsh for farming or the ground was to difficult to cultivate. There are, of course, feral cats in Ireland just as there are in Scotland and some people in Ireland are trying to control them humanely:

      http://feralcatsireland.org/Feral_Cats/Feral_Cat_News.html

      There are remote areas in the Irish mountains too where distant relatives of the European Wildcat were reported earlier in the 1900’s, but the section pressure on these native Irish cats would be much higher because they are not as remote as in Scotland so farm cats and domestic cats would be able to interbreed with them more and it’s unlikely that there are any true Irish Wildcats left.

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