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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan : THE JUNGLE CAT : The Sunday Statesman : 10 November 2019
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The Jungle Cat

" One of the animals long familiar to villagers where human settlements and agriculture adjoin scrub and forest, is the Jungle Cat, Felis Chaus to be specific - and, as will be apparent later in this note, there is need to be specific.

The earliest extant Tamil poetry, some 18 centuries old, has a brief vivid reference to it :

"The round-footed Jungle Cat
Waiting at dusk at the edge of Jowar-field.
Waiting with inexorable patience
For the atrutting red-watiled village
Rock to stray near."

I spent my boyhood in the scrub jungles and forest of what used to be the Tamilian and Telegu tracts of the Madras Presidency, and have often seen the Jungle Cat. Later in the Deccan, I saw it again, many times - once, a Jungle Cat got somehow into my pigeon-house and slaughtered my racing homers, as most predators will when in the midst of thronging prey, and after watching it for a while as it crouched in a corner and spat at me, I let it go. I let it go. I mention this past experience only to say that in my youth and prime I knew the animal well, and had no difficulty in telling it apart from domestic cats run wild (which is also quite common in the scrub-jungles around villages), even when I could get only a brief glimpse of it. For one thing,it was twice as big as its domestic cousin turned feral,with a comparatively short tail ringed with black at the tip, standing almost as tall as a jackal.

During the past few years,however, when I had occasion to see and even closely observe jungle cats in forests all over the peninsula, and in UP. West Bengal and Assam,I have not always been able to tell it apart from feral cats with certainly. Perhaps it is that with this greater opportunity and closer observation I am finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile the animals actually seen with textbook descriptions of Felis chaus.

The textbooks describe the Jungle Cat as an animal with a foot-long tail and about 18 inches high, long-legged and varying in colour from "sandy grey to yellowish grey" (a ground-colour difficult to comprehend) with the tail ringed with black towards the end and black tipped; the ears are said to be reddish, "ending in a small pencil of black hairs",and while there may be vestigial stripes on the underside and flanks,the body is unmarked. The weight is given as from 10 to 12 pound. The Jungle Cats I saw varied from fulvous grey to a grey with a distinct red tinge to it (a ferruginous grey) in ground colour, and sometimes a neutral grey, with the chin, throat, insides of the limbs and the chest and abdomen much paler.Adults animals did not show any patterning on the body, but carried the characteristic rings at the end of the tail and the black tip~ the tail was comparatively short, and noticeably so in short adults.

The ears always showed the pointed tuft of short, dark hairs. The iris varied in colour from yellow ochre to a pale green, and was not always pale green as stated in the text- books. It will be seen that except for the marked ferruginous ground colour of many Jungle Cats seen (especially in the Nilgiris and in West Chanda in Maharashtra) there is no discrepancy in colouring between the taxonomic descriptions and the specimens I observed."

- M. KRISHNAN

This was published on 17 September 1972

# The close-up photograph of a Jungle Cat has not been reproduced here.