19^3- ScHARFF. — Supposed Wild Cat in Irclajid. 127 
ON THE SUPPOSED OCCURRENCE OF THE WILD 
CAT IN IRELAND. 
BY R. F. SCHARFF, PH.D. 
In the June number of the Irish Naturalist (supra, p. 124) 
Mr. Barrington suggests that I should describe in plain 
language how the descendants of the Irish Cave Cat, if such 
still exist, are to be distinguished from the Domestic Cats 
that have gone wild. It is not an easy task for me to 
describe w^hat I have not seen, and yet it is reasonable 
to enquire what I expect the Irish Wild Cat to look hke. 
Mr. W^arren's repeated references to Felis catus {supra 
pp. 94-6) imply that he is thinking of a cat with a bushy tail. 
It is natural enough that we should be looking for a bushy 
tail among the supposed Irish Wild Cats because the Scottish 
Wild Cat possesses that feature. But I urged already eight 
years ago^ that the undoubtedly wild Irish Cave Cat pro- 
bably had a pointed tail. I also showed that the teeth of 
this cat, which had been found fossil in the caves of County 
Clare are not hke those of the Scottish Wild Cat. The 
teeth resemble those of the Wild Cat of Sardinia and Africa, 
If the Irish Wild Cat still occurs in outlying parts of Mayo 
and Donegal we can recognise it by its teeth. The back 
cheek teeth of both upper and lower jaw are considerably 
larger in the fossil jaws of the Irish Cave Cat than in the 
Domestic Cat. 
We possess in the National Museum a skull of an enormous 
cat which was killed in a rabbit-warren near Grey stones, 
and another skull of a huge fierce cat which terrorised the 
birds in the Zoological Gardens for years and was finally 
shot. Both of these specimens had the back teeth of an 
ordinary Domestic Cat, and were therefore not truly 
" Wild Cats." 
Hence, the trapper and sportsman should examine the 
teeth of the cats if he wants to find out whether they are 
Domestic Cats gone wild, or genuine Wild Cats. I must 
* Irish Naturalist, vol, xiv., 1905, p. 79. 
A 2 
