This is an unusual story, perhaps a unique story and one which strikes a chord with me because quite a lot of people ask whether you can keep Pallas’s cat as a pet. The answer is that you cannot because although they look super cute with their long and dense fur and their interesting faces they are still wild cats at heart and that wildness goes right through them like the words that go through a stick of Brighton rock. You never get rid of it which is why keeping an exotic pet i.e. a wild cat as a pet never really works.
But I’m told that four Pallas’s cat (proper name: manul) kittens were found by a farmer in his barn. Perhaps initially he thought they were stray domestic cats and apparently they were raised by two true domestic cats at a rescue center where I presume the farmer took them. They were then released into the wild.
The picture shows them being fed raw chicken it seems to me presumably at the rescue center. You wonder whether they became slightly domesticated and there certainly became slightly tame which begs the question whether they were able to survive in the wild without the training of their mother. There is no report about the success or otherwise of their reintroduction into the wild.
We don’t know where the farm is located. The picture does also beg the question as to whether the farm is within the distribution of this small wild cat. What I mean is how did the cat get there in the first place?
My research indicates that the Pallas’s cat is found in Russia but in the southeast and in only a small part of that very large country. The quote below comes from the IUCN Red List which is an organisation charged with tracking and monitoring the survival of flora and fauna. If the farm in question is in the far southeast of Russia then these Pallas’s cats might have wandered into a barn.
The core populations of Pallas’s Cat are believed to occur in Mongolia and China. In Russia, the Pallas’s Cat occurs along the border with Mongolia and China mainly in the Altai, Tyva, and Buryatia Republics (Altai and Sayan Mountains), and Trans-Baikal Territory.
IUCN Red List
Note: raw chicken alone would not be a good diet for these wild cats. It it likely that the rescue center did not add supplements to the raw chicken to make it a balanced diet although they probably feed the cats with standard cat food as well which would have added-in the much needed nutrients required by both domestic and wild cats.
