Talk:Kellas cat

A hybrid of what?

Resolved

 – Article text was clarified years ago.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:40, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

The article says: a specimen was shot and killed in 1984 by a gamekeeper named Ronnie Douglas and found to be a hybrid. Nowhere does it tell us what it was a hybrid of. --Mûĸĸâĸûĸâĸû 06:48, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

“ The Kellas cat is named after the village of Kellas, Morayshire, Scotland, UK. In the early to mid 1980s there was much speculation being placed as to whether a new species or an 'emerging' new species of cat had been discovered in mainland Scotland. After close study based on the evidence from eight collected specimens, it was concluded by Dr Andrew Kitchener of the Royal Scottish Museum, in Edinburgh that seven of the cats showed traits common to both Scottish wildcats and domestic cats. These cats were described as introgressive hybrids, representing animals with varying degrees of Scottish wildcat and domestic cat ancestry. ”

source 76.199.139.88 (talk) 20:00, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Landrace?

Resolved

 – None of the sources say "landrace" (which means a mostly free-breeding population of domesticates); term replaced with "population".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:44, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Shouldn't the Kellas cat be considered a felid hybrid rather than landrace? A landrace (i.e. domestic shorthair) is a population that has adapted to a regional habitat. The Kellas cat on the other hand is a rare form of a hybrid between domestic cats and the wildcat. If the Kellas cat was considered a landrace, then wouldn't every other Scottish wildcat hybrid be considered one? Obviously it can't be tamed, and there's no recent information about the prevalence of black wildcat hybrids in Scotland.

Schvass (talk) 17:50, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

I can't claim any expertise but I think you are correct. Ben MacDui 18:45, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

It's /how/ long?

"The Kellas cat is described as being 24 to 36 inches (61 to 91 cm) long"

and

"The animal snared in 1984 was [...] 43 inches (110 cm) in length"

So, is the description off -or- was the snared animal not a "Kellas cat"?

Buzz-tardis (talk) 21:44, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

It could that they are measuring the length differently, without and with the tail. Unfortunately the first is not explicitly sourced and I don't have access to the book cited for the second. I note that Ref 1, referring to the 1984 animal, says "Adult male cat, 43 inches from nose to tail" which assuming it means tail tip includes the tail in the length. —  Jts1882 | talk  07:21, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

The "24 to 36 inches (61 to 91 cm)" claim is now missing, and I'm not sure what source it was from. I think Jts1882 is probably correct, but this should be dug back out of the history and both sources consulted in more detail. PS: I've replaced two of the original citations to versions that can be read full-text for free on Internet Archive, so that may help.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:47, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Question

Does anyone know if Kellas cats are a separate wildcat population from Scottish wildcats with their own distribution, or just rare individuals within the Scottish wildcat population? Kellas cats might've lived throughout Great Britain once like Scottish wildcats did. Roy Robert Hay (talk) 12:38, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

@Roy Robert Hay: The sources so far (which are a bit spotty) indicate they are a hybrid between domestic cats and the Scottish wildcat in particular, not the dom. and some other wildcat, so they could not be a separate population from the Scottish wildcat in a meaningful sense. That is, dom. cats turned feral have been getting into SWC territory for many centuries and interbreeding freely with them. None of the sourcing available so far indicates anything like the KC being a competitor population that prefers to breed among its own kind and is putting species-level pressure on the "pure" SWC population (and that would seem extremely unlikely; i.e., this does not appear to be a situation like Homo sapiens versus H. neanderthalensis; despite proof they could and did interbreed a bit, the two hominins populations were largely mortal enemies). But the KC has barely been studied at all yet and they are ultra-rare, so we may never have such data available, so we just don't know for certain.

One of the sources cited hypothesized that the dom. cat might have been introduced by the Romans, but the introduction was at least as early as the 3rd century BCE [1], through trade, according to newer data. Cats also figure in early Irish myths, and Ireland was free of Roman involvement (that said, they were not written down until the Early Middle Ages, often with embellishments by Christian monks, so that bit of evidence is less conclusive). Cats have been used as ship's cats for at least 3,000 years by Phoenicians and Greeks and whatnot. We know the Greeks reached Britain (including Scotland) by the 4th century BCE, and engaged in enough long-term trade to map out all the peoples/kingdoms there. The Greeks were already big on cats by no later than the 6th c. BCE. Phoencians probably much ealier (and there's some evidence they got all the way to Scandinavia by sea). Ireland was reasonably well-known to the Romans by the 1st c. BCE, and might have been known earlier, though it's difficult to be certain with surviving materials. Regardless, there was extensive contact between Ireland and Britain going back into prehistory. The Romans definitely did bring cats with them, and would have increased their British population, and are known to have spread cats north and west all over Europe (with not a lot of cat evidence before Roman contact). Nevertheless, there is proof of non-wild domestic cats in Britain that goes back to at least 250 BCE in Dorset, and Britain was in constant trade with continental Western Europe since prehistory, with that entire region subject to varying levels of Roman interaction for many centuries. And Greek before that, e.g. the founding of Marseille as the Greek colony of Massalia around 600 BCE. Phoenician colonies in Iberia even earlier, to about 1100 BCE, with Iberia having extensive contact with Ireland and to a lesser extent Britain (the latter had more trade with what is now France).

The point being, there's almost certainly been DC geneflow into the SWC population since the late Iron Age. We know for genetic fact that multiple wildcat populations have contributed to the DC's genetics at different times, too. (Ottoni, et al. "The paleogenetic history of the dispersal of cats in the ancient world", 2017, Nature Ecology Evolution; free access here but it may be time limited; prepress 2016 version available for free here with an Academia.edu account; if both fail, it's probably accessible through JSOR or something via The Wikipedia Library). That is, DC and WC interbreeding has been constant throughout the DC's historical range. I would thus be probable that British WCs south of Scotland, when they still existed, would have interbred with early DCs, but I'm not aware of any archaeogenetic evidence about any specimens of English and Welsh ones. As for the SWC, it is critically endangered, with estimates ranging from 30 to 150 left (plus about 80 in capitivity, desperately being used in a breeding programme), and I've also see concerns about there being hybridization happening at all, that it'll simply turn into a form of extinction as feral DC geneflow swamps the SWC lineage.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:39, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

ENGVAR: carcass/carcase

A MOS:ENGVAR question: While I learned to read and write in England, that was a lifetime ago, and I'm not always certain what to prefer. One of the sources cited prefers the spelling carcase with reference to the preserved specimens, but when I do an n-gram confined to British English, I find that carcass dominates there (since around 1976, when I moved to the US!) by an increasingly wide margin [2], though not as much as in the American corpus. Is there some reason this n-gram data could be skewed? I usually get this stuff right, but in one previous case I did not (I thought that mediaeval was still preferred in British English, but it is not [3]).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:18, 4 February 2024 (UTC)