Reading the conservation status of a wild cat

What the categories mean

The IUCN Red List places each assessed species into a category based on criteria covering population size, rate of decline, geographic range and fragmentation. The assessment is about probability of extinction under current conditions, which is why a widespread species can still be listed as threatened if its numbers are falling quickly.

• Least Concern — widespread and abundant enough not to qualify for a threatened category. It does not mean a species is safe everywhere.
• Near Threatened — close to qualifying for a threatened category, or likely to qualify in the near future.
• Vulnerable — facing a high risk of extinction in the wild.
• Endangered — facing a very high risk of extinction in the wild.
• Critically Endangered — facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.
• Data Deficient — not enough information exists to assess risk at all.

How the categories fall across the family

Population direction

Trend is recorded separately from category, and it is often the more revealing figure. Across the species profiled here, the trend breakdown is as follows.

• Decreasing — 30 species
• Stable — 8 species
• Increasing — 2 species

The pressures that recur

Threat lists differ species by species, but a small number of pressures appear again and again across the family. These are the ones documented most frequently in the profiles here.

• Road mortality — recorded for 16 species
• Prey depletion — recorded for 7 species
• Habitat fragmentation — recorded for 5 species
• Persecution near poultry — recorded for 4 species
• Snaring — recorded for 4 species
• Killing near poultry — recorded for 4 species
• Deforestation — recorded for 3 species
• Killing by herding dogs — recorded for 3 species

Habitat loss and fragmentation

Conversion of forest, grassland and wetland is the dominant pressure for most of the family. Fragmentation matters as much as outright loss: a landscape can retain forest cover and still fail to support a cat if the remaining patches are too small or too isolated for young animals to disperse between them.

Prey depletion

A forest can look intact and be functionally empty. Indiscriminate snaring across South East Asia removes both the cats and the animals they eat, which is why species such as the clouded leopard and the Asian golden cat decline even inside protected areas.

Conflict with livestock

Cats that kill sheep, goats, calves or poultry are killed in return. This affects animals at every size, from the snow leopard in high pasture to the kodkod raiding a henhouse. Most successful programmes address it through better livestock protection and compensation rather than enforcement alone.

Hybridisation with domestic cats

For the wildcats this is now the leading threat. Free-ranging domestic cats interbreed with the African wildcat, the European wildcat and the Chinese mountain cat, and hybrids can look entirely wild, so genetic screening has become a standard conservation tool.

Recovery is possible, and documented

The clearest example in the family is the Iberian lynx. Reduced to roughly one hundred animals in two isolated populations in the early 2000s, it recovered through captive breeding, reintroduction, rabbit habitat management and road mitigation, and was moved from Endangered to Vulnerable in 2024.

Tiger numbers have risen in India, Nepal and Bhutan, and the Eurasian lynx has been re-established in several western European countries after regional extinction. In each case recovery took decades, sustained funding and the cooperation of the people who share the landscape.