Cats of the Wild

In Central & West Africa wildlife crime and corruption was rampant - and yet not a single individual had ever been prosecuted. It's in these fragile landscapes where lions are on the brink of extinction, leopards are under threat and other endangered species such as the western black rhino, gorillas and elephants could soon disappear.

So when a young activist discovered the lack of any real enforcement or action against wildlife crime in Cameroon, he began a journey to become the first NGO in the region to directly fight wildlife crime & corruption.

Almost twenty years later, they now operate in nine countries and incredibly have helped arrest and jail over 3000 wildlife traffickers in West and Central Africa. So in this episode, we'll explore how to fight wildlife crime & corruption and how the wild cats of West & Central Africa need our help - now.

Guest:

Ofir Drori, EAGLE Network

Links

EAGLE Network

Kamérimètre (Prod. By P1ague E1even & Zubo) - Cameroon Hip Hop Music

This episode is unlike any I've done before! We're taking a journey into computational science and mathematics and how the sand cat has inspired a new algorithm that could improve artificial intelligence, civil engineering, scheduling, smart routing, supply chains, and even aerospace engineering.

My mind was blown when I read this research paper - and to be honest, it is an extraordinarily complex topic. But together we're gonna explore how the sand cat and the natural world around us is having an impact on some of the most cutting edge technology on our planet. We'll meet the sand cat, an enigmatic small cat native to the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, and of course the big brain behind this algorithm, Dr. Amir Seyyedabbasi to help explain the maths, the science and algorithms that are already powering our future.

Guests

Dr. Amir Seyyedabbasi - Software Engineering, Istinye University, Türkiye (Link to Papers)

Mongolia - an epic expanse of rolling grasslands, unforgiving desert and rugged mountains. It's also the home of one of the more unusual wild cats on this planet - Pallas’s Cat or the manul.

Since 2020, it's been been listed as "Least Concern" in the IUCN Red List - but if we look deeper, it's quickly evident that we do need to be concerned about the Pallas’s Cat - particularly in Mongolia.

Today we'll meet the Italian scientist on the ground who's using innovative camera trapping techniques to discover the real story of the Pallas's Cat in the wild of Mongolia.

Guest: Claudio Augugliaro, Wildlife Initiative

Links

Borneo is a treasure trove of biodiversity and home to one of the oldest rainforests in the world.

It’s also the epicentre of the palm oil industry and so these precious and fragile ecosystems have been ripped wide open, creating opportunity for disease transmission between wildlife, people and their domestic animals.

So what does this mean for the endangered wild cats of Borneo like the Sunda Clouded Leopard and the Flat-Headed Cat?

Guests: Sergio Guerrero (City University of Hong Kong) & Liesbeth Frías (Nanyang Technological University)

Links: Health at the Edge Project

Over 6,000 kilometres from Moscow in the Far East of Russia is the remote and harsh habitat of the Amur Tiger - also known as the Siberian Tiger. It is one of the largest cats in the world, and there is estimated to be around 400 remaining in the wild. The largest threat for the Amur tiger is poaching - but there's really only one way to truly understand how and why poachers poach - and that's to talk to the poachers directly.

And so American wildlife criminologist, Allison Skidmore had a proposal for her university - to go and live in these hunting communities in Far East Russia for months at a time to find out first-hand the REAL extent of the threat of poaching for the Amur Tiger.

Is it a crazy story? Absolutely. It's a story that shows true courage and an unrelenting ambition to learn more about this threat so conservation actions can be taken in the future.

Links

One day in 2012, Rajan Choudhary, a naturalist from Bardia National Park in Nepal was guiding an American tourist in his jeep through the park. Game drives are common in this park with the park home to elephants, tigers, dolphins and many other species.

It was late and as they were returning to the hotel - all of a sudden, in the distance on the right-hand side, about ten metres into the forest - he saw this kind of light in the darkness. Now when you're driving at night, you might have noticed that the eyes of animals or people can reflect the light as tiny little beacons.

So they stopped and reversed back to where they saw this light and gazed into the forest. Rajan borrowed this guest's camera - a DSLR with a long lens - to get a better look - it was a cat, a very small cat - but he wasn't sure what species he was looking at.

So what did Rajan and his guest see that night exactly? Listen to the latest episode of Cats of the Wild - link in bio or find it in your favourite podcast app

Follow the Rusty Spotted Cat Working Group on Instagram @rustyspottedcat.rscwg

#rustyspottedcat #wildcatconservation #wildcats #naturepodcast #wildlifeconservation #wildlife

On February 26, 2019 - the Big Cat Public Safety Act was introduced to the US House of Representatives - in its official summary, it's a bill that revises the restrictions on the possession and exhibition of big cats - species of lion, tiger, leopard, cheetah, jaguar, or cougar or any hybrid of such species, including to restrict direct contact between the public and big cats.

The introduction of this bill was the result of years of advocacy and campaign work from animal organisations such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Big Cat Rescue and Born Free USA - and yet today, almost three years later - the bill still isn't law in the US. 

So in this episode, we're going to explore the issues with big cat ownership, how it impacts the conservation of cats in the wild and importantly what are the next steps for the Big Cat Public Safety Act.

This episode features Devan Schowe from Born Free USA

Links

Happy New Year! Not a normal episode - just a quick thank you and how you can support Cats of the Wild!

Get in touch @catsofthewildpodcast on Instagram or [email protected]

Nepal - a mountain kingdom and home to twelve species of wild cat including the tiger, snow leopard and Eurasian Lynx but today we're talking about a small cat - the fishing cat in the Western Terai region of Nepal.

Ganesh Puri is a wildlife and forest ranger - and he saw first-hand the conflict between the fishing communities of this area and the fishing cat - whose numbers are thought to be less than two hundred here.

So Ganesh started the Western Terai Fishing Cat Project and has built connections in these communities to protect the fishing cat and improve the livelihoods of these fishing communities.

This is the story of a man with a big dream for a small cat in a small part of a small country.

Links

The Western Terai Fishing Cat Project is supported by the Fishing Cat Conservation Alliance, Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation, Panthera and the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund.

The Sunda Tiger is one of two subspecies of tiger - and today they can only be found on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. There's less than four hundred left in Sumatra's forests and time is running out before they become extinct in the wild.

As deforestation and illegal hunting continue throughout Sumatra, what hope is there for the long-term survival of the Sumatran Tiger? In this episode we chat to Leif Cocks, founder of the International Tiger Project about the work they are doing in Indonesia and the different ways that you can help save the Sumatran tiger today.

Links