By Jamie Sneddon.

It’s an arctic day in February 2016. Two haggard looking men sit in a little car on Scotland’s wild west coast. Numb hands are clicking through camera trap images, in the fleeting hope that one could be what they had come all this way for. Suddenly, in between the false triggers and mice, a flash of stripes! They watch the footage again, and another 20 times. A distant, striped figure, stalks through a patch of sunlight in between the trees and is illuminated in striking detail. It’s a cat but not just any cat. What the two men are looking at is the incredibly rare and elusive Scottish wildcat, a species on the very brink of extinction. At that time people thought they knew how bad the situation was, but really, they would later discover it was far worse. None of this mattered on that cold day in 2016. Two men, exhausted by weeks of horrific conditions and disappointment, on the verge of tears, bounced about like excited schoolgirls. At the time I didn’t realise that, my friend Ewan and I, were looking at a species that only a few years later would be classified as functionally extinct in the wild.

Functionally extinct but well and truly alive.

The Scottish wildcat is like no other species I’ve ever worked with. When I first came across them, they weren’t a household name. They were a rare species but not kind that made news headlines or caused bitter rivalries between conservation organisations, yet. I think it was partly down to the fact that people had no idea what they were dealing with. Secretive animals that prefer to stay away from humans don’t get all that much attention. Especially when the average person thinks they look just like a tabby cat. Those individuals clearly haven’t seen the real deal!

Scottish wildcats present so many problems for conservation that it’s hard to know where to even begin. The easiest one to start with is that fact that, thanks to habitat loss and persecution, they have, for the most part, been pushed to some of Scotland’s most remote places. To put the problem of persecution into perspective, an estate in Glengarry recorded 198 wildcats killed between 1837-1840. For a long time, anything with tooth or claw was considered to simply be a ‘pest’. As a society we’re still paying the price for that misguided logic.

The remoteness of the species is exactly what led me to Ardnamurchan, a peninsula on west coast of Scotland. It’s a beautifully harsh place to visit. I was young, full of drive, and in need of an adventure. The idea of visiting somewhere remote, with poor weather and limited internet or phone signal, in the depth of winter, was exactly what I needed. Thanks to storm Gertrude I wasn’t disappointed! The ferries were closed for days, the house I stayed in was freezing cold and the windows almost caved in with the force of the wind. I found myself under a duvet at night, in two layers of clothes, my teeth chattering, and my toes numb, but with a big smile on my face. It could have been the hypothermia creeping in, but it was all part of the experience. If I wanted to be comfortable, I definitely wouldn’t have chosen a career in conservation!

Storm Gertrude coming in over the hills.

Ardnamurchan was Wildcat Haven turf, a group dedicated to saving the wildcat in the wild. They opposed the government plan to use captive breeding as a backup for conserving the species in the wild. After being passed up for an internship with the government group, Scottish Wildcat Action, I was all for working with the underdog group and fighting ‘the man’. Wildcat Haven was a sink for passionate, if slightly misguided graduates, so I fitted right in. The work involved running around the remote peninsula like headless chickens, speaking to everyone and anyone about cats.

“Have you seen a wildcat?”,
“Do you have an unneutered pet cat?”,
“Have you seen any feral cats?”.

I’m sure the locals loved our interrogations. We only had 4 short weeks, so every second counted. We planned our moves on a big map pinned to the wall, something that always looks cool, fact, and put fliers through every door and on every notice board. It wasn’t long before we had some neutering requests coming in.

No internet means pinning a map to the wall for planning.

Wildcat conservation is all about neutering domestic cats and that’s why conservation groups often do it free of charge. It’s not glamorous work but it’s essential. That’s because, in a cruel twist of fate, the domestic cat can breed and produce fertile offspring with the Scottish wildcat. What you end up with is hybrids that are poorly adapted to survival in the Highlands, or at least are less suited than wildcats. There are more domestic cats than wildcats so over time the problem gets worse in a lovely phenomenon called an extinction vortex. Eventually, as is the case now, the population can be described as a hybrid swarm. The waters are so muddied that the population of ‘wild living’ cats in Scotland is really a spectrum from wildcat to domestic cat. As much as we all want to believe it, there’s probably no such thing as an 100% pure wildcat anymore. Wildcat Haven hoped, and still hope, to save the species by clearing areas like Ardnamurchan of anything less than pure wildcats and keeping the area protected from any unneutered pet, feral or hybrid cats. So, we set about catching cats.

Wheel spinning my little clio along the shore, while racing the incoming tide, to pick up traps in the dark was all part of the adventure.

When you go on a cat neutering campaign you end up bumping into some interesting characters. The following people probably wouldn’t mind being named but I’m going to give them each an alias for the sake of this blog.

Let’s start with one of my favourite characters, Mr D. Mr D was a unique man and had a lot of cats. On our first visit to his house they literally came out of the walls, cupboards, under the furniture, basically anywhere you could squeeze a cat. They bred as they liked and shared some lovely diseases with each other. A standard nightmare colony in terms of their ability to threaten wildcat populations. Not that Mr D was worried about that. He told us extensively about the nuclear fallout from Chernobyl causing every animal in the area to die. The men in white coats did come and put chemicals in the water to counteract the nuclear damage but by that point the wildcats were gone. I’m not 100% sure any of that is true but equally I don’t have any counter evidence. It was likely that some poor, unsuspecting man from Scottish water was taking samples from a burn and became involved in Mr D’s Chernobyl theory.

Mr D also told us about his run in’s with the police when he was reported for dynamite fishing in a loch. Something he tried to deny while his soaking wet, fish gut covered, boiler suit dried on the washing line. Some of the team really didn’t want to visit Mr D but he was a firm favourite of mine. Luckily for me, the pack of dogs he used to own that would live in the ruins around his property, weren’t around anymore. The cats were nasty, but I hear the dogs would have likely taken one of my limbs off. Anyway, we managed to neuter a lot of his cats and solve a few of their health problems while we had them in the clinic. We couldn’t solve the Chernobyl problem, but you can only do so much with limited funding.

Next on the character list is Mrs B. The team met this lovely 80 something year old woman while she was lying on her back in her kitchen. No one knew how long she’d been there, but she was happy for the help. It made the idea of sending two young men over to trap her horde of feral cats slightly less daunting. Despite her initial worry about us, we eventually ended up making regular pitstops to have a cup of tea and watch the news with her. She clearly appreciated the company and we appreciated the chance to warm up. She also didn’t mind the smell of cat pee and fish that followed us around, so the relationship worked well. She embodied one of the most common problem cat owner stereotypes. While Mr D was a cat hoarder, Mrs B was a solid gold feeder. A poor cat with two kittens showed up years ago and she took pity. Within a few years it was hard to keep track of her regular customers. So hard in fact that she kept trying to get us to neuter her neighbour’s pets. If Mrs B said it was okay to neuter a cat, it was best to get a second opinion.

The third legendary character on the list is Mr B who just so happened to be Mrs B’s son. Turns out having far too many cats ran in the family. His sister also popped up at one point, but she had less cats thanks to her very own ‘control methods’. She wasn’t a very nice woman. Anyway, Mr B owned a farm and, on that farm, he had a big old cat colony. He also had a pack of border collies that chased my car and attacked the tyres every time you pulled up, just to make things interesting. Mr B was another type of cat owner entirely, the mouser. He was a man of few words and simply kept cats to keep the mice under control in his barns. Generally, colony cats are not pretty cats. Matted, dirty fur, parasites, diseases and various injuries. They also have a very specific smell, not a good one. However, Mr B had some of the most beautiful cats I’ve ever seen. They all had the same brown and white, t-shaped markings on their faces and little pink noses. Their father had the exact same markings and was an incredible tom. He was also the biggest, wildest, most aggressive cat I have ever dealt with. I first saw him looking at me from the rafters with fire in his eyes on our first visit to the farm. After that he disappeared. We caught something like 30 cats at the farm, but big daddy didn’t show himself for weeks. Until one of the last days of trapping that is. He had obviously been off wooing the ladies on neighbouring farms and reminding every tom for miles who was boss. After all the waiting and anticipation there he was, filling the trap and letting out a low, deep growl worthy of a cat ten times his size. Getting him back to the neutering clinic, that also happened to be a hotel room, was a white knuckle experience. He was the Moby Dick of the project and, If I’m being completely honest, I felt guilty neutering such an impressive beast. I’ve still to meet a more impressive tom cat.

One of Mr B’s beautiful cats. Their father looked identical but twice the size and covered in battle scars.

The above stories should highlight that wildcat conservation boils down to two things, dealing with domestic cats and people. It can be mentally and physically difficult work but it’s the only way to save the species. As long as intact domestic cats dominate the Scottish countryside, the Scottish wildcat will cease to be more than a shadow, living in only the wildest corners of the map. Genetics research, captive breeding and reintroductions are no match against hybridization and disease spread. As a nation it should be common sense to treat cats more like dogs and have tighter regulations. Can you imagine if dogs were free to roam, breed as they liked and hunt at will around the country?

I loved my crazy west coast adventures so much that I went on to manage a following project in Caithness. Eventually though, I realised that I wanted to work for a project with more structure, scientific grounding and collaborations. The politics associated with wildcat conservation was starting to overshadow the work I did, no matter how worth while it was. So, I moved on to Scottish Wildcat Action. My work as a contractor has involved identifying individual cats from camera trap line-ups, far harder than it sounds. From this a ‘cat-alogue’ is made, a photo log of every cat caught on camera over the course of 5 years in wildcat priority areas. It’s the sort of job that drives you to madness when multiple named cats turn out to be the same cat or vice versa. This, along with other important data organising tasks and uploading images to citizen science websites, makes up my role in wildcat conservation now. It’s not as adrenaline pumping as driving around single-track roads in a little car full of angry cats, but it’s equally important. The information gathered is helping to inform the newest project in the war to save the wildcat.

The Saving Wildcats project is cutting edge and very exciting. After years of information gathering this project looks to be one with less talk and more action. A state-of-the-art captive breeding centre is being built, captive cats will learn how to survive in the wild and will eventually be released into areas free from the threat of hybridization and disease spread. To me this speaks of the countries commitment to saving the species. As a nation we have decided not to let this iconic cat fade into memory. Reintroduction is not simple and there are hard times ahead, but wildcat conservation has never been easy so why change things now. If we can fight to save the wildcat with even a flicker of the passion shown by the animal itself, then I whole heartedly believe that the Scottish wildcat isn’t a lost cause. It’s not over until it’s over.

“They will fight for their freedom with a passion we can only dream of.” – Mike Tomkies.