Sand Cat

It gets nearly all the water it needs from the bodies of the animals it eats — rodents, birds, reptiles — which are mostly water by weight, and its kidneys are efficient at conserving fluid. Wild sand cats are rarely if ever seen drinking, and they can persist in areas with no standing water at all. They also avoid the worst heat and water loss behaviourally — a sand cat spends the hot day in a burrow it has dug or taken over, plugging the entrance or resting deep where it is cooler and more humid, and comes out to hunt only at night, when desert air temperatures can drop close to freezing. Its thick coat insulates against both extremes.

The undersides of a sand cat's paws are covered by a thick cushion of wiry fur that grows between and over the pads. It does two jobs. First, it acts like a snowshoe, spreading the cat's weight so it does not sink into soft, wind-blown sand as it hunts. Second, it insulates the pads from ground that can exceed 60°C in summer sun and fall bitterly cold at night, letting the cat move comfortably when other predators cannot. A side effect is that hairy-soled feet leave very faint, blurred tracks, so sand cats are genuinely difficult to follow or count in the field.

It is no danger to people — it is a tiny, shy cat that avoids humans and weighs less than most pet cats. It is, however, a formidable hunter of venomous snakes, killing sand and horned vipers with a flurry of stunning blows before a bite to the neck. As a pet it is a poor choice and, in most of its range, illegal to take from the wild. Sand cats are highly specialised for a desert life, are prone to respiratory and other health problems outside very dry conditions, do not tame like a domestic cat, and are the subject of managed zoo breeding programmes rather than the pet trade. Wild capture for pets is one of the pressures on some populations.

They are close relatives — both are in the genus Felis — and a sand cat is roughly house-cat-sized or smaller, but several features set it apart. The sand cat has a noticeably broad, flattened head with large, low, wide-set ears; a pale, sandy, lightly marked coat that matches dune country; dense fur covering the pads of its feet; and a stocky body with short legs. It retains a kitten-like face into adulthood. Behaviourally it is a strict desert specialist, nocturnal, burrow-dwelling, water-independent, and adapted to hunting prey that moves under the sand — none of which describes the domestic cat, which descends from the African wildcat of scrub and farmland.