Fewer than 100 ocelots are left in the U.S. – all crowded into a couple of isolated pockets in the southernmost tip of Texas – and time isn't on the cats' side. Experts say a single blow – hurricane, fire or disease – could wipe the species from the country in a moment.

“The most exciting thing about these genetic insights from the past is that they offer hope for the wildcat’s future. In Scotland we’ve been striving to find a genetic marker to identify Scottish wildcats, and now we have one”

When an animal control officer gets a call from a “surprised” citizen, who just figured out their newly purchased mountain lion is not getting along with their poodle, police confiscate a leopard from a drug raid or as they did a few years ago, find a male Africa lion walking down the road in a neighborhood in Houston, they call IEFS.

"It is true that there are fewer tigers in the wild today than there were at the launch of Project Tiger in 1973," says R N Mehrotra, chief wildlife warden of the desert state of Rajasthan, where the reserve is located.

Nearly 400 crocodiles, bred in captivity over the years, have been released in the reserve, Banerjee said. A 2004 census said more than 270 tigers were roaming the reserve in West Bengal state, bordering Bangladesh.

The world’s wild tigers are on a “catastrophic” path to extinction as numbers continue to decline because of increased poaching, habitat destruction and poor conservation efforts by governments, a new report has said.

Wildlife experts have long warned that the population of tigers is on the decline, mainly due to poaching and human encroachment of its habitat. In Malaysia, a project has been put in place in the east coast to ensure that humans and tigers can share the land.

An Indian court has banned hotels, flash photography, firearms and diesel vehicles from the last remaining tiger habitat in the Indian state of Rajasthan to protect dwindling numbers of the threatened cats.

Genetic study has confirmed what archeologists have suspected for decades -- the "Cradle of Civilization" is also the birthplace of the house cat.

Painstaking genetic research shows that the cat first became domesticated soon after humans began farming and building the first civilizations, somewhere in the ancient Near East. And, in typical feline fashion, the decision to take up residence was theirs.

The first domestic cat was a fierce mouser that struck an enduring friendship with farmers who settled in the Middle East 10,000 years ago, researchers say.

"House cats — which includes fancy breeds and feral cats — those cats all form a genetic group that is virtually indistinguishable from ones in the Middle East," said Stephen J. O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute.

The research team of National Museum of Natural History in Paris uncovered a carefully buried cat on Cyprus.

The ocelot is a wild cat distributed throughout South and Central America and Mexico, but has also been found as far north as Texas and also in Trinidad.

Genetic experts have found evidence a restaurant in China has served tiger meat in defiance of a 1993 ban, a U.N. expert said on Tuesday.

Eighty-four Siberian tigers, among the world's rarest animals, have been born since March at a northeastern China breeding center, an official said Sunday.

"Even the Border Patrol acknowledges that a wall only holds up intruders three or four minutes."