Can you give me your contribution for a research on Sicilian wild cats?
Hello everyone. Thanks for your attention❤️, I wanted the help of you cat lovers from all over the world for my research. Your help would be fundamental for me; I am collecting data to try to find a relationship between the footprints left by cats and their size; this method would help me to estimate the size of some wild cats of which l only have the dimensions of the footprint. If you want to participate please write in the comments:
1)width of your cat's footprint,
2)length of your cat's footprint,
3)length of your cat's tail,
4)height of your cat at the shoulder,
5)length of the cat from the tip of the nose to the beginning of the tail.
Thank you very much for reading the message and thank you to those who collaborate with some data, I leave you some photos of footprints of European wild cats and some images of them taken by my camera trap. I would like to point out that there is no profit motive and I am only collecting data because this species is very rare in my area and there is very little information about it.
When walking, cats tend to put their weight on their front paws, so it would be better to measure those; but if it's easier for you, you can also measure their back paws, since I've found minimal differences (usually less than 1mm).
Here you go! If you would like photos of the cats for reference, just let me know.
All of the cats are ex-ferals from my neighborhood colony, and all except number 1 are very closely related (3 and 4 are littermates, 2 and 5 are either full or half siblings sharing a mother).
thank you so much for the data, actually there is no need for the images but if you want you can always send them in the comments (I never refuse to see photos of cats). And anyway congratulations on adopting feral cats, a truly beautiful action.
I’ve got three I can measure, should I measure their toebeans directly or should I try wet them with some water and leave a print on paper, then measure the print? Just want to help you get nice standardised data
Also one of my cats has a kinked tail (congenital, heterozygous kinked/bobtail gene) that is pretty short, not sure if that would screw up the data.
thank you very much for your help, the second option would be better, that is, measuring the footprint on a sheet of paper or on sand. If you can, send me the data (preferably using the metric system, but you can use any measurement and then I'll take care of the conversions). You can also send the data of the cat with the kinked tail. If you want, you can use this table by downloading it and writing your data so that everything is more organized; thanks again for your help.
I ended up having to measure with paper, as the litter the cats use aren’t fine grained enough to leave prints.
I couldn’t get the third cat to do it unfortunately, she’s not very good with handling as she’s quite timid, she’s got a semi feral background.
Had to scratch out a part as I swapped the numbers accidentally when I did it on my laptop but now I’m on my phone haha. The last two columns are both in cm as well.
No problem, it’s an interesting research. Personally I would love to see if you find any difference in pawprint size vs cat size proportions between genders and age(?) In general it’s pretty interesting, would love to know any other correlation you might find
I posted my cats’ measurements and looked at your cats’ measurements, and now I’m fascinated!
You have tall cats, and I have long cats! Yours have paws where the width is shorter than the length, and mine are the opposite except for one. How interesting! I never would have thought to compare cat body proportions like this.
I managed to find a pic of it, screenshotted from a gait assessment done at my old apartment hence a bit messy and low quality.
But it’s the best level shot I’ve got where he’s going parallel to the camera, this is him during trot picked a non suspension phase for the screenshot.
I guess he IS quite lanky and tall but not very long over his body?
That’s really interesting. My male definitely has pretty long legs and hence is quite tall, tho I think the difference could come with how they’re measured too and their posture during the measurement?
Some cats carry themselves a bit more “crouched” than others, and it depends on the time too, maybe putting the tape on could make them crouch a bit too if that’s what happened with yours?
As for the width I reckon it could be weight related too, since their paws would “spread” horizontally more when there’s more weight but they don’t spread as much longitudinally? My female is pretty petite (~2.7kg)so I imagine her paws don’t spread much when walking, and my male is pretty fit these days (4.2jg). But it could also be how it was measured too I guess, I used paper against hard floor, it might be different in sand my cats will spread their paws on soft grounds like sand/snow.
And my cats are all asian street cats, not related to each other tho as far as I know, maybe there are indeed some proportion differences between randombred cats from different areas
Lastly I didn’t really include my third cat, who is actually pretty short proportion wise, she’s (approximately) about the same height at the shoulder as my small female, but is a tad longer and rounder lol thus heavier. She has very similarly sized paws despite being bigger, while my male has pretty big ones.
Here’s a proportion shot, it’s the petite female. Not the most levelled as sadly all other really nicely levelled shots has her paws in some grass. Sadly I realised I’ve never done one for my lanky male lol, would be fun to do next time around he’s got funny proportions (small head long legs)
I added side photos (not the best, unfortunately) to my post if you wanted to see how they look standing and walking somewhat “naturally”.
I tried to get around the crouch issue by both measuring with a measuring tape directly and comparing standing shoulder height against a solid object as they walked by, and didn’t find too much variation between the two, so I went with the tape measurement.
As far as the paw width/length goes, I dipped paws in a shallow dish of water, and then set them down so that they had to leave tracks across thin brown cardboard (like construction paper) on a hard surface, and then outlined/measured the “best” print, so our results should be fairly similar, I think.
Cat 1 (Cairo) is both large and heavy for his size (~6.5 kg)
Cat 2 (Houston) is 1yr and still growing. (~4.5kg)
Cat 3 (Sydney) and Cat 4 (Delphi) are pretty small (~3.9kg)
Cat 5 is still only 5 months old, so she’s still growing.
All of mine are ex-strays and ex-ferals from my local colony in the southeastern USA, and all except number 1 are probably either full or half siblings.
Your babies are so beautiful! I love the red tones in their fur; you don’t see that rich red color very often in the population near me. My colony is mostly colorpoints, with the occasional black or grey tabby. (That’s why I am almost certain my Cairo is not related to my others, haha. He’s the only big orange floofball.)
Bonus pic of Cats 1-4 together: (Houston was a kitten at this time)
Interesting, I suppose my cats, especially the male, is pretty tall for his length after comparing the pictures. I posted some other pictures of the paw prints under the thread that I did again this morning, but this time against the patio after they stepped on some wet grass in the yard and yeah the length remains slightly more than the width. I suppose it’s just natural variation amongst cats? Or maybe the weight/habit/gait factor is coming into play as well.
My girl actually had that reddish tone from being a somewhat cryptic torbie, on certain angles you can see her orange patches, but the rufousing and ticking lowers the contrast a lot so it takes certain lighting to see it. I don’t think there are much colorpoints if at all in the feral population where I’m from, it’s mostly the standard mix of solids and tabbies, not much dilute either. That said, ticked tabbies and kinked tails are quite common here, ticked it probably more common than classic tabbies, and comparable to mackerels.
This is probably the best pic to show the orange patches mixed in, the ones on her head tabby markings are probably easiest to see. But under most lighting the patches just blend into a smooth coppery color for the whole coat.
She has no white spotting but her toebeans are black and pink mixed mottled and that is how she was discovered to have been a torbie all along instead of just a tabby with high rufousing.
Yeah it’s pretty interesting! And I forgot to mention one thing that’s consistent with my cats is that none of them are good climbers. They’ve never been able to climb vertically up scratching poles or trees, maybe that could be a factor with the paw width (underdeveloped muscles on extending their digits to climb?) or maybe the way they’re built makes them bad at climbing. I’m more inclined to believe they’re bad cuz they grew up on the streets where there weren’t much to climb as it’s all concrete, hence the muscles and different way they carry their paw posture?
Strange! Mine are from a neighborhood colony, so they were living in the middle of a city, but there are lots of old oak trees full of squirrels to chase, so they love climbing.
Houston, the one in front in this photo, regularly finds his way to the top of my interior doors inside my house (and then cries until I get him down because he is better at climbing up than getting down).
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u/TheLastLunarFlower Oct 03 '24
Should we measure front or hind paw print sizes?