The Ocelot

Ocelots are found in southern Texas and live in Mexico and every country in Central and South America excluding Chile. The ocelot is one of nature’s most beautiful cats in the cat family. It’s called the tiger cat or leopard cat of America. It is three and a half to four feet long, sleek and streamlined with a tail to fifteen inches. It resembles a jaguar, though on a smaller scale. Because of their docility, many ocelots were caught and kept for pets. Their fangs, claws, and teeth were removed in the process.

Even though it’s easy for them to live with humans, capturing ocelots was put to an end in the 1980’s. During that period, an ocelots coat cost as much as forty thousand dollars, and selling the animal itself as an exotic pet was about $800.

Ocelots do not cover a lot of territory during its lifespan; its normal range is hardly more than two miles wide. Ocelots abide in thorny shrubs and trees like ebony, coma, and acacia. Getting through these thorny shrubs is difficult, if not impossible for humans, and they provide a barricade against enemies. It also homes ticks, black widows, and killer bees, which is an effective defense to intruders. Because ocelots feast mainly on rodents and rabbits, birds, young deer, monkeys, snakes, they're not menacing to livestock.

Conservation Issues: In southern Texas, the ocelot is bordering on extinction, with less than a hundred still living in the wild in the U.S. The main reason so few exist is because of diminishing habitat, which is now taken over by malls and highways and the like. Breeding in captivity is just one of several steps wildlife biologists are taking to save the ocelot from vanishing entirely from the United States.