Breeding Wild Cats in Captivity

Despite the perceived difficulties of introducing captive-bred cats into wild habitat, it is important to maintain captive populations as a last resort backup in case a subspecies should disappear completely from its natural environment.
In order that captive breeding can be carried out in a controlled manner, avoiding the use of parents of doubtful provenance and at the same time maintaining as much genetic variation as possible within the subspecies, studbooks have been set up for some species of cats.
Studbooks are maintained by dedicated people based at various zoos around the world and can be consulted by breeders wishing to find suitable mates for their cats. Details are given on the pages relating to the species concerned.
At present, studbooks are known to exist for the following cats:

While there is clearly a need for more work of this kind, we know of only about 120 studbooks for the whole range of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, so the cats are actually much better covered than most other families.