Cats For Africa was established in 2007 to:
* provide information on the smaller wild cats of Africa *
* promote African research involved with small cats *
* support conservation of wildlife habitats in Africa *
* support ethical African wildlife rehabilitation centres *
What is a Small Cat?
Small, Medium and Large…
Very broadly speaking small cats are the wild cats that weigh less than 30kgs. In Africa the three big cats are lion, leopard and cheetah, and the other seven species are all referred to as small cats. Some of the larger small cats are sometimes described as medium sized cats, such as the caracal and serval. However one does not generally use the term ‘medium cats’ – they are either ‘big cats’ or ‘small cats’!
Image Credits
We are extremely grateful to the people and organisations, that kindly gave us permission to use their material on this website. Copyright vests in the individual owners. Please do not use any of the images without permission.
The distribution maps and most of the images and were reproduced with permission from: Luke Hunter and photographer Gerald Hinde, from the book ‘Cats of Africa‘, Struik Publishers, Cape Town – available on Amazon. Other sources of images are indicated underneath each image.
My Background
Hi, my name is Mandy and I am the author of Cats For Africa.
I was born in East Africa and discovered a love for wildlife as a child and have had an interest in the big cats ever since. Later in life, whilst following a career in Information Technology I realized I didn’t want to sit at a computer for the rest of my days and began to study a Science degree part time with a Zoology major. I also volunteered on a number of wild cat projects in Africa and South America to get some field experience.
In musing about what my research interest would be I realized it just had to be wild cats! I subsequently learned there were far more cat species than just lions and tigers and discovered the remaining ~30 endearing small cat species. I read an article about the seven smaller cats of Africa and started this website to learn more about them and to share the information I found. I qualified with a post graduate Masters degree and published a thesis on Caracals.
