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.

So, when Rotem's original mate Sela died, the Safari people began combing the world's zoos for a replacement and last September, chose the husky male Kalahari, 3, from Sweden. It was not love at first sight. "We had expected that after the two young cats had met and been exposed one to the other properly, they would take to one another, but they didn't," says Horowitz. When put together during the day, the cats neither locked lips, nor talons for that matter. "They didn't engage in hostile actions – they didn't expose fangs, for instance," she says. "What happened is we put them together - and nothing happened. They would look at one another but kept it platonic."