Sand cat
The sand cat, Felis margarita, leaves tracks that are almost impossible to read. Long hairs grow between its toes and cushion the foot pads against hot sand. The same fur makes each print faint and hard to identify or follow. That obscurity suits an animal of sandy and stony deserts far from any water, and it has kept this small wild cat largely out of sight. Even now, only a few in-depth studies have followed wild populations, so its ecological needs are still poorly understood.
How did scientists first find a cat that hides so well? What lets it live and hunt where water is so far away? And what has human presence meant for a species spread thinly across two continents?
Victor Loche described the first sand cat known to science in 1858. His specimen came from the area of a place he wrote as "Négonça", in the northern Algerian Sahara. He gave it the name Felis margarita, honouring the French General Jean Auguste Margueritte. The original specimen, the holotype that defines the species, appears to have been lost.
In 1925, a sand cat was recorded for the first time in Central Asia, in the Karakum Desert. A year later, Sergey Ognev proposed a new species called Eremaelurus thinobius from a specimen collected in the eastern Karakum, in Turkmenistan. In 1938, Reginald Innes Pocock placed it in the genus Felis as Felis thinobius. He later treated it as a sand cat subspecies, which is how it is widely regarded today.
The two known regions of the cat's range were separated by an enormous gap. In 1948, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger found a sand cat skin in an oasis of the Rub' al Khali, in Oman. That discovery partially closed the gap between North Africa and Central Asia.
More names followed. Pocock proposed F. m. meinertzhageni in 1938, based on a skin from the Algerian Sahara. The same year he proposed F. m. aïrensis, based on a female collected in the Aïr Mountains in 1937. In 1974, the German zoologist Helmut Hemmer proposed F. m. scheffeli, described from seven sand cats captured alive in Pakistan's Nushki desert. Hemmer, Grubb and Groves added F. m. harrisoni in 1976, using the skin and skull of an adult male from Umm al Samim in Oman. That cat had been captured in 1967, yet it received its name only in 1976.
By 1974, three of those names were provisionally accepted as valid: margarita, thinobia and scheffeli. Taxonomists also suspected that sand cats eventually recorded in Afghanistan and Iran might prove to be distinct subspecies. In 2005, W. Chris Wozencraft recognised four subspecies, adding harrisoni. He treated meinertzhageni and aïrensis as synonyms of the nominate form, F. m. margarita.
In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the Cat Specialist Group cut the list to two, based on differences in body form. The Saharan sand cat, Felis margarita margarita, lives in North Africa. It is smaller, with brighter and more yellow fur, more pronounced markings, and two to six rings on the tail. The other, Felis margarita thinobia, goes by the names Turkestan, Arabian and Pakistan sand cat. It lives in West and Central Asia, and it is larger, with fainter markings, a darker greyish coat, and only two to three tail rings.
Genetics tells an even more modest story. Mitochondrial DNA from 47 individuals across the range showed haplotypes that differed by only one to three base pair mutations. Such slight differences between African and Asian cats suggest the Sinai Peninsula may have acted as a barrier to gene flow.
Studies of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from all the cat family place the start of its evolutionary radiation in Asia, in the Miocene. Within the genus Felis, both methods agree on the order of divergence. The jungle cat, F. chaus, split off first, then the black-footed cat, F. nigripes, and then the sand cat.
The sand cat's lineage migrated into Africa, possibly during Pleistocene glaciation events. Long periods of low sea level between the continents probably eased the journey. Excavators working in a Late Pleistocene cave at El Harhoura, near Temara in Morocco, recovered a sand cat jaw and other skeletal remains.
A sand cat weighs only 1.5 to 3.4 kg, and its head and body measure 39 to 52 cm. It has a flat, wide head and short legs, with a relatively long tail. The ears sit low on the sides of the head, which gives the face its broad, flat look.
The coat is a pale, sandy colour that zoologists call isabelline. It is much lighter on the lower head, around the nose, on the throat and on the belly. A faint reddish line runs from the outer corner of each eye across the cheeks. Dark brown to blackish bars mark the limbs, and the tail ends in a black tip, with two or three dark rings between buff bands. Individuals vary. Some have neither spots nor stripes, some are faintly spotted, and some carry both.
The face is sandy brown, with large greenish-yellow eyes ringed in white and a blackish nose. The whiskers are white and reach up to 8 cm long. The ears are tawny at the base and tipped with black.
The sand cat's outer ear resembles that of a domestic cat, but the ear canal is about twice as large. Its acoustic input-admittance is about five times higher, and its hearing is about 8 decibels more sensitive. The bony chambers behind the eardrums, the auditory bullae, are greatly enlarged compared with other small wild cats. Long, closely spaced white hairs keep foreign objects out of the inner ear.
In Central Asia, the winter coat grows very long and thick, with hairs up to 2 in long. The claws on the forelimbs are short and very sharp, while those on the hind feet are small and blunt. The bite at the canine tip measures 155.4 Newton, with a bite force quotient of 136.7. For a cat that kills venomous snakes, those numbers matter.
Radio tracking in Israel revealed a nightly routine. The cats were generally active throughout the dark hours, hunting and travelling an average of 5.4 km. At dawn they retired below ground and stayed in the burrow all day. Each cat used several burrows within its home range.
The burrows run about 1.5 m deep and are dug into slightly slanting ground. Most have a single entrance, though some have two or three. Foxes or porcupines abandoned some of them, and gerbils or other rodents dug others. Seasons change the schedule. In winter, sand cats sit in the sun during the day. In the hot season they are crepuscular and nocturnal.
Home ranges can be large. A male in Israel covered 16 km2. In Morocco, a male travelled 14.1 km in 30 hours, and a female moved over 13.4 km2 in six days. Two males there had home ranges of 21.8 and 35.3 km2. In 2018, several sand cats in the Moroccan Sahara were seen resting in brown-necked raven nests, built in umbrella thorn acacia trees.
The sand cat is solitary, except in the mating season and when a female has kittens. It makes loud, high-pitched, short rasping sounds, especially when seeking a mate, much like a domestic cat. It also marks territory with sprayed urine, scent and scratch marks. It buries its feces and covers them with sand. When it runs, its belly stays close to the ground, and it moves in a fast run broken by occasional leaps. It is capable of sudden bursts of speed.
In the Ténéré, a desert region in the south-central Sahara, sand cats preyed mostly on small rodents and young cape hares, Lepus capensis. They also took greater hoopoe larks, desert monitors, sandfish skinks and venomous Cerastes vipers. Any surplus catch was buried for later. The cats got the moisture they needed from their prey, though they drank water when it was available. The Toubou people have reported sand cats slipping into camps at night to drink fresh camel milk.
Diet shifts with the place. In Israel, remains of Egyptian spiny-tailed lizards were found near sand cat burrows, and the cats were seen taking jirds, Cairo spiny mice, desert larks and small reptiles. In central Iran, Blanford's jerboa and the Balochistan gerbil were the most frequent remains around dens. Cats collected in the eastern Karakum in the late 1950s had eaten tolai hares, small rodents, birds, reptiles and invertebrates. In March 2018, a sand cat in the Kyzylkum Desert was recorded feeding on a MacQueen's bustard.
From Western Sahara to the Kyzylkum, sand cats favour flat or undulating ground with sparse grasses or small bushes. They avoid bare, shifting dunes, where little prey lives. The cats are flexible, though. In 'Uruq Bani Ma'arid, on the western edge of the Rub' al Khali, they use sand dunes in the hot season from May to September. In the cool season, from October to April, they use gravel valleys as well.
In North Africa, the records are sparse and scattered. Sand cats were photographed in Western Sahara's Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab region several times between 2005 and 2016. In April 2017, kittens were photographed there, hiding beneath a tuft of Panicum turgidum grass. One individual was recorded near a salt cedar mound in Algeria's Ahaggar Mountains in 2008. Another was briefly seen at night in 2011 near Mali's Lake Faguibine. In southwestern Libya, sightings continued from 2017 to 2025. Egypt's rocky Western and Eastern Deserts have produced records since the mid 1980s, and the Sinai Peninsula since the mid 1990s.
On the Arabian Peninsula, the cat keeps resurfacing. In northern Saudi Arabia, it was observed at three localities in the Turaif area in 2014-2015. In the Al-Ula region, it was recorded in five protected areas between June 2024 and July 2025. In Abu Dhabi, a sand cat was sighted on a gravel plain between dunes near Al Ain in 2003. In a protected area in Al Dhafra, several were recorded between April and December 2015, after ten years without sightings. Oman's Dhofar Governorate produced records in 2021-2022, and in 2023 the cat was recorded for the first time in Qatar, in Al-Ureiq Reserve.
In the late 1980s, four sand cats wore radio collars for a few months in the Arabah Valley, which lies mostly in Jordan. They often roamed through Israeli army camps and crossed the international border. No one has recorded the species in Israel since the turn of the century, and since 2002 it has been considered locally extinct there. In Jordan, the first sighting came in 1997, during a survey of desert in the east of the country. A camera trap photographed sand cats in a protected area near Palmyra, Syria, in 2000 and 2001. In western Iraq, they live in the Najaf, Muthanna and Al Anbar Governorates.
Iran has several strongholds, among them Abbas'abad Wildlife Reserve, Kavir National Park and Petergan Rural District. From March 2014 to July 2016, sand cats were also observed in Sistan and Baluchestan Province, mainly in habitat dominated by black saxaul. In Pakistan, the first sand cat was detected in 1966 near the Lora River in Balochistan. Others turned up in the late 1960s in the Chagai Hills, an extremely arid region of dunes and stony plains at about 1200 m.
In Central Asia, sand cats were known up to the late 1960s across the Karakum, from the Ustyurt Plateau in the northwest to the Kopet Dag Mountains in the south. Photographers found adults with kittens in the southern Kyzylkum Desert in the spring of 2013 and again in 2014.
A female sand cat in oestrus calls often and scent marks for five to six days. After a gestation of 59 to 66 days, she gives birth to two or three kittens. They weigh 39 to 80 g at birth and have spotted fur, pale yellow or reddish. Growth is quick. The kittens reach three quarters of adult size within five months and are fully independent by the end of their first year, reaching sexual maturity soon after. In some areas the cats raise two litters a year. The generation length is about 4 years and 9 months. Nobody has documented how long wild sand cats live, but in captivity they can reach 13 years.
Since the mid-1960s, sand cats caught in Pakistan were traded and exported to Europe. In the early 1970s, cats from southwestern Pakistan reached zoos around the world. The trade ended in 1974, when the Pakistani government stopped issuing permits.
Zoos then discovered how hard the species is to keep. Of 228 sand cats born in zoos worldwide by 2007, only 61% of the kittens survived to day 30. First-time mothers often neglected them. Adults are highly sensitive to respiratory disease, and upper respiratory infections are the main cause of death. The most common illness is infectious rhinotracheitis. Keepers have to provide very arid enclosures, where humidity and temperature do not fluctuate.
The captive population in the European Endangered Species Programme descends from 18 founders, almost all from the Arabian Peninsula. By December 2009, the global captive population stood at 200 individuals in 45 institutions. Twenty-three of those were European zoos, holding 102 cats. The captive population in the Species Survival Plan rests on only eight founders.
In 2010, two kittens were born at the Al Ain Zoo after the first in vitro fertilisation of the species. Frozen-thawed embryos had been transferred into the oviducts of ovulating females. In July 2012, four kittens were born at the Ramat Gan Zoo, as part of the European Endangered Species Programme.
In Saudi Arabia, wire mesh fencing around the Saja Umm Ar-Rimth Natural Reserve in the Najd region has trapped sand cats. Several were found stuck in the fences, including some encountered near the adjacent Mahazat as-Sayd Protected Area. In the Tabuk Region, hunters killed two sand cats in 2013 and 2016. A local farmer captured another in 2014 and kept it in a cage.
In Iran, human settlement and livestock grazing are rapidly degrading fragile arid ecosystems. In Uzbekistan, local people uproot shrubs for firewood and as a base for silkworm cocoons, and the area of drifting sand is growing. Across Western Asia, uncontrolled hunting and poisoned baits set for predators add to the pressure. The cat's small-mammal prey also depends on vegetation, which swings with drought and declines with desertification.
In the Sahara, oasis inhabitants lay traps for foxes and golden jackals, and sand cats have been killed in them. Others died in retaliation for killing poultry. Domestic dogs have killed sand cats in Israel and Iran. In Israel, caracals and wolves were also thought to prey on them.
The pet trade takes more. In 2012, two sand cats sold as pets were presented to a local nursery in Baghdad, and they died a week later. In 2014 and 2015, truffle collectors trapped four sand cats alive and offered them for sale in a Baghdad wildlife market. Their fate is unknown. Sand cats are also caught for the pet trade in the United Arab Emirates. Domestic and feral cats moving into desert areas may bring disease. In Saudi Arabia, one of 17 wild-caught sand cats tested positive for feline leukaemia virus.
Felis margarita is listed on CITES Appendix II. Hunting is prohibited in Algeria, Iran, Israel, Kazakhstan, Mauritania, Niger, Pakistan and Tunisia. Egypt, Mali, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates offer no legal protection. The Jerusalem Biblical Zoo started a reintroduction project in Israel's Arabah Desert. Captive-born cats were kept in an acclimatization enclosure, but they did not survive after release into the wild.
The species was once classed as near threatened. In 2016 it was downlisted to least concern, because the estimated global population exceeds the threshold for a threatened category. How far that population has declined, though, remains unknown.
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Updated
Common questions
Who first described the sand cat?
Victor Loche described it in 1858, from a specimen found in the northern Algerian Sahara. He named it Felis margarita after the French General Jean Auguste Margueritte.
How many subspecies of sand cat are recognised?
In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the Cat Specialist Group recognised two. These are the Saharan sand cat, Felis margarita margarita, and Felis margarita thinobia, found in West and Central Asia.
How does the sand cat get enough water in the desert?
In the Ténéré, sand cats met their moisture needs from their prey. They drank water when it was available, and the Toubou people have reported them drinking fresh camel milk at camps.
What is the conservation status of the sand cat?
It was downlisted from near threatened to least concern in 2016, because the estimated global population exceeds the threshold for a threatened category. The extent of any global decline is unknown.
All sources
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