The dangerous feline alarm in Milan travels via the social network when a post appeared on the FB page of Palazzo Marino, the seat of the municipality, asking the citizens for help in finding a person seen around the city with a caracal on a leash.
Illegal to own one in Italy
The caracal (Caracal caracal) is a medium-sized feline, with a range from Africa to Asia, which cannot be legitimately kept in Italy being included in the list of animals dangerous for public health and safety. Even if it is a domesticated feline (in theory, but certainly not legal), like the serval and the cheetah used since the ancient times for hunting, the feline photographed several times in the city was not a caracal.
Caracat, the miniature feline that costs 10 thousand Euro
The little feline that became whose images became viral in a few hours was actually just a caracat, or a hybrid obtained (in Italy it is a prohibited practice as it is forbidden to detain it) by crossing a male caracal with an abyssinian cat. From this cross you get fertile hybrids that, after the third generation, can be sold on the network worldwide, or at least in countries that allow it. Animals intended for wealthy buyers, with a strong exhibitionism or looking for easy earnings, since a pair of caracats can ensure the owners huge income: the price of a puppy is in fact around 10,000 euros.
The caracat, therefore, while maintaining a very active nature and a size of all respect (15 kg) is only one of the cats created at the table to respond to the sick fashion of the moment: have replicas in the appearance of wild felines, without being so. Other examples of this unnatural creation are the savannah cats, obtained by crossing a serval male with a Siamese cat, or the Bengal cats, which are hybrids created by crossing a domestic cat with a South American tigrillus cat, and the Ashera cats, a cross between an African wild cat and an Asian catpardo, the most expensive and similar to small jaguars.
Nothing dangerous, therefore, but, if we want, something very disturbing, because the man replaces the mother nature and the natural selection, creating "monsters", not at all, however, suitable for the city life.
The owner of the caracat has been tracked down and warned by the Guarantor of Animal Rights of Milan from carrying the animal around the city. The mistress, a small town in the Czech Republic, said she was in Italy to have her puppy undergo a surgical operation.
Still to be clarified the type of intervention and the only certainty currently seems to be the fact that the lady bought the specimen to mate, with another female caracat of which it is already in possession.
Man has always loved to surround himself with exotic animals, often forgetting their well-being and the needs arising from the evolution of each species. In recent years, the shortcut of hybridization has developed to circumvent regulations and prohibitions, replicating animals with an appearance very similar to their wild ancestors.
The fourth-generation hybrids (those after the F3) lose their connotation of wild felines from the technical and legal point of view and can, therefore, be sold without running into the mesh of the law. On the web you can find animals of all kinds for sale, as demonstrated by the fact that sometimes are found, even in Italy, banned animals such as the two young pumas illegally detained and then seized recently in Piedmont.
For safety reasons, but also to protect animals, many experts in the field believe that more regulation is needed, both on the creation and keeping of these hybrids and to obtain greater control of what is offered for sale on the net.