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Cat News - quo vadis? Well-intended ideas sometimes backfire. We have been sitting so many times with the Jackson’s in their house above Lake Geneva, with a cup or a glass in our hands, listening to Adrienne’s war secrets, Peter’s stories about birds and tigers or about his expedition to Everest to get the first interviews with Hillary and Tenzing in 1953. Our reaction was – probably like many other friends enjoying the hospitality in Bougy-Villars – always the same: “You should write this down”. Some weeks ago, Peter, who now lives in London, let us know that he intends to resign as the news editor of Cat News, which he founded in 1984, because he wants to concentrate on writing the family history… Cat News is part of the Jackson family history, and the (hi)story goes on. A leopard can’t change his spots, and we are optimistic that Peter’s and Adrienne’s traces will still be found in the forthcoming issues of our newsletter. Nevertheless, Cat News will change. When we took on the responsibility for the journal some years ago, we were very aware of the fact that, as we are not professional writers and not even of English mother tongue, we would need more support from our members, friends and readers, and that we would have to reduce the editor’s contribution in favour of submitted papers. Now, we will also need more outside support for the news section, which is an important part of Cat News and must be carried on. The response in regard to authors’ contributions has been encouraging. More papers are submitted, and we are already facing a backlog in editing and publishing them. One consequence of this is that this issue has 56 pages instead of the usual 40. Another consequence is that we are getting a bit more selective and reject papers beyond the strict scope of Cat News. The goal of the newsletter is to advance cat conservation, and contributions adding to our understanding of cats and their preservation are welcome. It is not our intention to make Cat News a high-ranking scientific journal, but to provide practical information that facilitates the work of those who take care of the free-living cat populations. We have also started
a new series, the Special Issues. The first one, published
last winter, summarised the status of the leopard on
the Arabian Peninsula. The second Special Issue, distributed
with this number of Cat News, covers the same species
for another region – the Caucasus. More publications
on specific themes are in preparation, e.g. an issue
on cheetahs in southern Africa and one on a revised
cat taxonomy. The classification of the Felidae is an
important topic for the Cat Specialist Group, e.g. for
the Red List assessment. The systematic that we use
at present is the one featured in Wild Cats (Nowell
and Jackson 1996). Since the release of the Status Survey
and Conservation Action Plan, new findings on genera,
species and subspecies of cats have been published.
To review these new findings and to propose an updated
classification of the cats, the Cat Specialist Group
is establishing a task force chaired by Andrew Kitchener.
More on this important task will soon be published on
our website (www.catsg.org) and, of course, in the next
issues of Cat News. |
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Urs and Christine Breitenmoser |
