Wildcats returning to England.
Wednesday 19th November 2025Wildcats returning to England.
The specific nature of the English wildcat is something that has intrigued me for many years. In my 1996 book The smaller mystery carnivores of the WestCountry I explore the matter at some length. The Scottish subspecies of the European wildcat, Felis sylvestris grampia was not officially described until after the species was allegedly extinct in the whole of England, although there were fierce, long legged wild cats on Exmoor around the time of the first world war. as far as I’m aware there is a severe paucity of bona fide English wildcats specimens in museums or private collections, and to the best of my knowledge it is not yet been proven that the indigenous English wildcat and the indigenous Scottish subspecies are actually the same thing. So, although I applaud the concept Of re-introducing the wildcat to England, especially mid Devon as it has been suggested, I am not convinced that we would be introducing the correct…
subspecies. On top of that, while there are still a lot of of feral domestic cats unneutered, the whole process seems pretty pointless because the domestic cat is a complex and progressive hybrid between the European wildcat and the African wild cat, and will interbreed happily with its Scottish kin.
Indeed, as the reasoning behind rewilding is to restore the original ecosystem as much as possible, the fact that they are already “wild cats“ in the British countryside, and furthermore ones that are very closely related to, if not identical to, the European wildcat, it could be argued that an expensive eradication programme followed by an even more expensive captive breeding and introduction programme in order to replace the multicoloured feral cats with a bunch of animals that basically appear to be tabbies is just a form of virtue signalling as We try to make some sort of restitution for the damage we have done to our ecosystem over the years. Why not stop the Badger culls, and reintroduce the lynx instead?
European wildcats could be seen again in England for first time in 100 years – The Guardian