Rare Asiatic Golden Cats are World-First Test Tube Babies

By Becky Crew | May 28, 2013 

A pair of Asiatic golden cats have been bred using artificial insemination for the first time in an effort to ensure the future of this rare and beautiful species.

Asiatic golden cats (Pardofelis temminckii) are small, nocturnal cats that live in the tropical rainforests of southeast Asia, their range stretching from China, Nepal and India to Burma, Thailand and Malaysia. They’re about two or three times the size of a house cat, the females growing to around 66 cm long (minus the tail) and 9 kg in weight, and the males are much larger at 105 cm long and 16 kg. They are shy animals that live solitary lives, fiercely maintaining large territories and only coming together briefly to mate.

The most common colouring of an Asiatic golden cat is a golden brown or fox-red, but they can also be a dark brown, grey or pale cinnamon. There is also a spotted, ocelot-like morph that is more common in China than the usual colouring, and numerous melanistic, or black, individuals have been found, particularly in Nepal. There’s even a tiny area in Sikkim, which is a small mountainous state in the Eastern Himalayan region, where melanistic Asiatic golden cats are far more common than any other morph.

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