Rare Sand Cat Kittens Born In Israel

The rare sand cats have been extinct in Israel since the 1990s, but the zoo is working with a European breeding program to improve their numbers.Rotem, a rare sand cat, with her three kittens, produced in an Israeli zoo despite her tepid reaction to her new mate from Sweden.

It's just as well for the sand cat species that personal taste isn't a prerequisite for procreation, it seems. Rotem, the only surviving sand cat at the Ramat Gan Safari Park, lost her mate a year ago and seemed rather repulsed by Kalahari, his replacement, a sand cat imported from Sweden last September. Maybe he put a bag on his furry head, because three weeks ago, to the astonishment of Rotem's keepers, she gave birth to three kittens, who have now started to totter on their tiny legs beyond the nest. "We had been extremely worried," confessed Sigal Horowitz, spokeswoman of the Safari, which is officially called the Zoological Center of Tel Aviv. "Here we had gone to all this effort to bring her a mate, a full year ago, and nothing was happening. And these are critical years for sand cats – they don't live forever."