Wildcats SVG – is a predatory mammal from the cat family.
The forest Wildcat SVG lives in Europe, North Asia and Africa. Hunting small mammals, birds and other animals of similar size. It settles where there is no shortage of hares, rabbits and birds nesting on the ground. Only in a few cases does she manage to catch a deer or roe deer, provided that the animals have been weakened and cannot hide. In years when there is a lack of food, cats hunt alone. There are several subspecies living in different regions.
Forest cats are very scared, often aggressive and try not to approach human settlements. They lead a single way of life and keep the area about 3 km2.
According to research by the National Cancer Institute of the United States, all modern domestic cats came from a group of self-cultivated forest cats about 10,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East. It is believed that this happened during the Neolithic agricultural revolution, as the cultivation and storage of cereals attracted rodents and wild cats to human settlements. The closest relative of a forest cat is a velvet cat (Felis margarita).
According to geneticists who studied cat mitochondrial DNA, the separation of the forest cat (Felis silvestris) and Chinese (Gobbian) cat (Felis bieti) lines occurred 230 thousand years ago.
Wildcats SVG description
Forest cats are brown with black stripes. They are larger than domestic cats, with a thick tail, as if “cut off” at the end. The body size is 45 to 80 cm long and weighs from 1.5 to 18 kg. The average height is about 35 cm and the tail length is about 30 cm. African subspecies are usually smaller and lighter in size. Females reach puberty after 9-10 months, while males are only in their third year of life.