So, how many rusty-spotted cats are left in the world at 2023? We should be able to get the answer from an organisation dedicated to knowing the answer which is the IUCN Red List. The problem is that this organisation is never up to date and the last time they assessed the world population of the rusty-spotted cat was on 20 April 2014 which is almost 10 years ago. And over those intervening 10 years it is certain that the population has declined and therefore the answer to the question in the title is that we don’t know at 2023 i.e. currently. The lack of knowledge is worse than that – see below.
They do say that the population is decreasing which is unsurprising. They also say that under their classification this diminutive wild cat species is “Near Threatened” which means, in layperson’s language, that it is threatened to be honest because the Red List has a tendency to underestimate the threat to these wild cat species in my experience.
Here is the answer
They conveniently leave the section under the title NUMBER OF MATURE INDIVIDUALS entirely blank. This confirms that they don’t know how many rusty-spotted cats that are left in the world and if they don’t know nobody knows.
They don’t have the information
They add that the population is not severely fragmented but they do state that, “Information on this species is not just meagre but also incidental and hence it is difficult to infer, with confidence, its population size.” At best they can infer the population size but they can’t even do that.
Usual threats
They are not even sure whether the population is declining but they have presumed that it is. And the reason will be the usual ones: residential and commercial development, agriculture and aquaculture, mining and quarrying, roads and railroads expanding, hunting and trapping terrestrial animals, human intrusions and disturbances, modifications by humans to the ecosystem and perhaps on a lesser scale diseases.
There is nothing more to say if I’m honest. We’ve never known much about the rusty-spotted cat. It is hard to see and track and understand because they are about half the size of a domestic cat and they moved quickly. They are described as the “hummingbird cat” because they are very energetic and very small just like hummingbirds.
The rusty-spotted cat is the smallest cat species in the world. They look cute and sometimes people want to have a pet rusty-spotted cat but it is a very bad idea because they don’t make good pets.
There are quite a few pages on this cat on this website so please search for them and in the meantime I publish links to three other pages below which might interest you.
