Chat rougeatre

Habitat loss and the spread of cultivation are serious problems for wildlife in South Asia. The total extent of prime habitat of the Rusty-spotted Cat in India and Nepal is equivalent to around 25% of the range of the species in these countries. These are perhaps the only areas where populations of the species are likely to persist in the future. This translates to 75% of the current habitat in India and Nepal facing an imminent danger of conversion to urban areas, industry, mining and other forms of land use hostile to Rusty-spotted Cat (Bhardwaj and Dutta 2014, Mazoomdaar 2015 a,b). Apart from agriculture and industry, parts of the Central Indian landscape within the range of the species is rapidly being converted for establishing solar plants as an alternative source of generating energy during the past few years (Sharma 2015). Since the climate summit of 2015, this is bound to increase given India’s strong commitment to reduce its carbon footprint. Categorization of certain portions of the species’s habitat (scrub, degraded forest) as wasteland facilitates such conversion (Mukherjee and Koparde in prep.).

As much of the distributional range constitutes marginal habitat for the species, this 75% loss of habitat could translate to a decline of around 20-25% (assuming 70-80% of the population resides in prime habitat and a relatively direct relationship between loss of habitat and loss of mature individuals) of the current population over three generations. Given the much smaller landmass of Sri Lanka, the mainland population constitutes perhaps 90% or a little more of the global population

Since much of the species’s range is within hugely human-dominated areas undergoing rapid land use change, fragmentation of habitat and disease should be considered as serious threats. There are concerns regarding possible hybridization of Rusty-spotted Cat with domestic cats (Kittle and Watson 2004) but these have yet to be substantiated and measured to determine if this factor is indeed a threat to the species. There is a belief that Rusty-spotted Cats do not get into conflict, unlike Jungle Cats, since they are believed not to prey on poultry (Manakadan and Sivakumar 2006). However, this needs to be backed by research and the threats need to be evaluated across the species’s global distribution.

Reflecting the uncertainty of this assessment, the species should be prioritised for research and monitoring.

The Indian population is included on CITES Appendix I, while the Sri Lanka and Nepal populations are included on CITES Appendix II. The species is fully protected over most of its range, with hunting and trade banned in India and Sri Lanka, although domestic trade was largely uncontrolled in Sri Lanka 20 years ago (Nowell and Jackson 1996); no more recent information has been traced. The occurrence of the species in Nepal has only very recently been documented and perhaps it does not figure specifically in conservation laws of the country. It occurs in a number of protected areas, including Yala National Park in Sri Lanka (Nekaris 2003, Kittle and Watson 2004), Wilpattu National Park, Sri Lanka (Andrew Kittle in litt. 2016), the Gir National Park (Pathank 1990), Sariska Tiger Reserve (Mukherjee 1998), Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve (Dharmendra Khandal in litt.), Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve and Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve (Dubey 1999) among many others, in India.

Reflecting the uncertainty of this assessment, the species should be prioritised for research and monitoring, in particular to clarify which of the various potential threats truly are problematic.