126 DELIBERATE DESTRUCTION OF ANIMAL LIFE 



in Nairn. But in this area also odd individuals may have 

 lingered in the more secluded woods till a later date, for 

 about 1860 the Forest of Dairy near Forres yielded an 

 example. 



Even in the wilder counties where one would 'imagine 

 that abundant shelter might have been found, the same 

 decades saw the gradual disappearance of the Wild Cat. 

 In Perthshire the last in the Athole district was trapped in 

 1857 ; in 1863 or 1864 the last south of Glen Dochart was 

 killed upon Ben More ; the last loiterer in Glenshee, at 

 Dalnaglar about 1870; and now they have been exterminated 

 throughout the whole of that mountainous county, even to 

 the wilds of Rannoch. In Argyllshire, the shores of Loch 

 Awe saw the last of the race in 1864, although a few 

 miles away, in Glen Orchy, an individual appeared in 1899. 

 Glenmore in Inverness-shire has lost the Wild Cat since 1873, 

 in which year also a solitary example was killed in East 

 Ross, where the species was already extremely rare. An 

 individual, however, is said to have been killed at Edderton 

 on the south of the Dornoch Firth so recently as 1912. 



The rapidity of the extermination of the Wild Cat during 

 a comparatively short space of years in country highly 

 adapted for its preservation is a matter for wonder, and says 

 much for the skill and determination with which it has been 

 tracked. In Sutherlandshire on the Duchess of Sutherland's 

 estates, a reward of 'half a crown was paid for each head, 

 and between March 1831 and March 1834, 901 Wild Cats, 

 Martens and Fulmarts were killed ; in the grounds of 

 Dunrobin six Wild Cats were slain between 1873 and 1880; 

 and in the districts of Assynt and Durness, while a keeper 

 killed twenty-four Wild Cats in seven years from 1869 to 

 1875, in the following five years he obtained only two (see 

 Fig. 42, p. 176), and a colleague who, in the four years 

 1870 to 1873 killed ten individuals, killed only four in the 

 following seven years to 1 880. 



Since then the Wild Cat in Scotland has proceeded 

 rapidly upon the path to extermination, and there is little 

 likelihood of its ever regaining lost ground outwith those 

 fastnesses in the forests of western Ross and Sutherland, 

 of Inverness and Argyll to which it has been driven by the 

 hand of man. 



