There is a photograph of the bay cat I can’t get out of my head. In it, the cat looks intensely right at the viewer, its sun-yellow eyes sporting two dark lines running up from them as if someone had applied makeup. In the mix of light and shade, its coat passes from brown to orange to blood red. Its long tail is tipped in white. The animal is in a dingy cage, littered with dead rats, but that doesn’t detract a bit from the cat’s majesty and strangeness. Jim Sanderson, the world’s leading expert on small wildcats, took the photo in 2008. The cat, which had previously been kept in a cage in a gas station, was being held in a private menagerie in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Sanderson, who founded the Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation, says the cat’s owner “knew what he had.” And what he had was arguably the world’s most elusive wildcat — and among the most endangered. A few days later, the cat was gone — likely sold for a pile of cash into the illegal wildlife trade. Its end was probably ignominious. The Borneo bay cat (Catopuma badia) is so rare, elusive and strange that after its discovery, it vanished from science for more than 60 years. Today, the bay cat remains stubbornly difficult to even find, no less research or conserve. It makes the snow leopard look conspicuous. The haunting portrait of a captive bay cat photographed in 2008. Jim Sanderson took this…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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