/ small hijack in reply
DrDeth, the problems are not with ethical breeders or owners. (Boy, there’s a *duuuhhh * statement!) You and your F3 are not problematic. Neither are ethical owners of purebreds, or F2s or F1s. And Bengals are not the only feline hybrids in the trade. In point of fact, our group and Florida’s regulators have been rather diligent in maintaining the right of ethical owners to obtain and maintain such animals. Please do not think that we are working at cross purposes! Still, problems remain.
In the case of canine hybrids the issues are often human safety, and commonly animal cruelty. Human safety can indeed be a problem with escapes, and more so with visitors to the location where the animals are kept. Owners tend to discount the potential danger, arguing that the animal is “just like a big dog”. Of course it is not, and can exhibit wild aggressive / defensive behaviors literally at the drop of a hat. That’s the safety side.
The cruelty issue comes about when the owner grows disabused of the “big dog” idea himself and becomes afraid of his own animal. Stalking behaviors or other aggressive displays may give the owner legitimate concerns. At that point the animal is often locked into some kind of cage or dog run, deprived of social interaction, and perhaps otherwise neglected or even abused.
With felines, the greatest issue we deal with revolves around, not the potential danger from the cat itself (which we agree to be miniscule), but the possibility of transmission of rabies. And rabies is a concern, since many of these cats are maintained at least part of the time in outdoor cages where exposure to rabies vector wild animals is possible. Scenario goes:
owner has a hybrid, exact percentage of wild greater than zero but otherwise irrelevant
cat bites someone outside the family (a visitor or, extremely rarely, after an escape)
since no manufacturer of rabies preventative vaccine claims either safety or efficacy in wild species (use of the vaccines is considered to be an “extra-label usage” which veterinarians are allowed to provide but which Florida law does not grant the same recognition of immunization as it does to “labeled usages”), Florida Health Department requires the animal be tested for rabies, which of course requires it be euthanized
owner refuses surrender, claims the cat is domestic
In the past, our fish and game agency attempted to use a kind of morphological test to define wild versus mostly wild versus truly domestic, for purposes of regulation. But there is no completely reliable set of parameters that will perform this separation in every case. Courts would not uphold it. Health department could not enforce its demands for surrender of such animals because it was impossible to prove (in a legal sense) that the animal was not domestic, as long as the owner maintained such to be the fact.
Bite victims are forced to take the expensive and still rather nasty post-exposure rabies series (or gamble with their own lives).
And having successfully resisted the attempt to classify his pet as *wild * for purposes of the Health Department, owner now goes further and insists that his animal can no longer be regulated by fish and game either! Which of course makes the animal no longer subject to even minimal cage and enclosure construction standards. Or anything else of a regulatory nature.
So Florida has adopted what might be thought of as the “duck” system. If it looks like, quacks like, craps like, then it will be considered to be…
For purposes of regulation, any wild/domestic hybrid in Florida (feline or canine) will be regulated at the most restrictive level for the species involved. So a Jungle Cat / domestic cat hybrid will be regulated as a Jungle Cat regardless of percentage of ancestry.
Hope this clarifies the matter!
/end hijack, with apologies
