By coincidence I came along some old notes I made for years about the history of the Marbled cat keeping and breeding at the Los Angeles Zoo. - 1966 : Feb. a female Marbled cat was obtained - 1969 : Jan. a male was obtained - 1971 : on Jan. 5 the first litter was born ( 1-1 ) after a gastration-period of 81 days. The male cub died 2 days later and the female cub was taken for hand-rairing but died after little more then a month later on March 14. - 1972 : a strange birth this time, one female cub was born Jan. 27, a second female cub 3 days later on Jan. 30. Both of them died within hours after the birth. The original female was sold at the end of 1972 ( not a clue why ? ) and replaced by a new female which was thought to be about one year old. - 1973 : In August the 2 animals were placed together - 1974 : This year a male was born and succesfully hand-raised - the world first sucesfull breeding of this species. Because of the lack of a number of International Zooyear Books I don't have information about what happened between 1974 and 1979 but from 1980 I again have information : 1980 : During this year 2 males and 2 females were born and at least some of them represented second generation-births. From these 4 animals only the 2 females were raised. 1981 : During this year the Los Angeles Zoo had 1-3 adult animals which all were bred in captivity. 1 or 2 animals were also send on loan to Lincoln Park - Chicago. During the year 1-4 kittens were born and from these 1 male and 1 female were raised succesfully. 1982 : A single male-cub was born this year but it failed to survive. 1983 : 2 males and 1 female were born but again, none survived. 1984 : 2 males born but none was raised. 1985 : A wild-caught-male came on breeding-loan to Los Angeles from Howletts - UK, so Los Angeles had 2 pairs. From the pairing-up of the Howlett-male and a Los Angeles-bred female a single female cub was born this year but again, it didn't survive. 1986 : No births at Los Angeles this year. 1987 : In the previous years Los Angeles had send animals on loan to Cincinnati and Howetts and now only the single wild-caught Howlett-male was left at Los Angeles. 1988 : The end of an era, Los Angeles last animal died .... Would be nice if some other ZooChatter could fill-up the information missing for the years between 1974 and 1980.
Wow, I didn't knew that kitten mortality in captivity were so high in marbled cat! This must be the reason for being absent from all zoos outside native range (except Al Bustan).Things didn't improved since then? I would die for see a marbled cat some day - and much better a healthy self-sustainable captive population...
