Sand Cat

Sand Cat battle analysis

The sand cat is built for places most predators avoid. It spends the hottest hours in a burrow and comes out at night to cover five to ten kilometres across sand and gravel, walking, listening and pausing. Its ear canals and middle ear are roughly twice the size of a domestic cat's, which lets it pick up faint sounds of rodents moving underground; it then digs them out at speed.

Its most striking hunting skill is snake killing. Saharan nomads describe it as a formidable hunter of horned vipers, and field accounts describe it stunning the snake with a flurry of paw blows before a fatal neck bite. It also has the stillness of a true desert specialist: when caught in a light beam it crouches, closes its eyes and waits, relying on its sandy coat to vanish.

In absolute combat terms, none of this changes its size. At about 2.8 kg it is lighter than a house cat and far lighter than the caracals, jackals and wolves that prey on it. It rates low in Attack and Defense, higher in Stamina for its long desert travel, and high in Special and Senses for its specialized hearing.

Habitat & range

Sandy and stony deserts with sparse grasses and shrubs across the Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, and parts of Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It prefers flat or undulating ground with some vegetation and avoids bare, shifting dunes where there is little prey. It shelters in burrows about 1.5 m deep, often ones dug by foxes, porcupines or gerbils. The rare Arabian subspecies has recently been recorded in Iraq (Al Sheikhly and Haba 2017) and in the central Syrian desert near Palmyra (Serra et al. 2007).

Diet & hunting

Small rodents (gerbils, jirds, jerboas, spiny mice), young hares, small birds such as larks, lizards such as sandfish and spiny-tailed lizards, insects and venomous snakes (Wikipedia; Cole and Wilson). It satisfies its moisture needs from prey.

Social life

Solitary; males and females come together only to breed. Home ranges overlap. In Morocco, tracked adults used very large ranges of about 275–320 km² on average.

Conservation

Listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (2016 assessment) because of its wide range, although it is rarely seen and poorly studied. Threats include habitat degradation, loss of vegetated sand habitat, uncontrolled hunting, poisoned baits set for other predators, domestic and feral dogs, and prey declines during droughts.

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