Scotland’s Wildcats Are Breeding in the Wild Again as Reintroduction Hailed a Success

The Scottish wildcat — a fierce, tabby-coated relative of the domestic cat once known as the “Highland tiger” — had become so rare in Britain that the wild population was declared functionally extinct. In response, the Saving Wildcats partnership, led by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, bred wildcats at a specialist release center at the Highland Wildlife Park and began returning them to the wild in the Cairngorms National Park in 2023. By the end of 2025, after three years of releases, the project had every reason to celebrate.

In total, 46 wildcats have been released, and an impressive 95 percent survived their first ten months in the wild, far exceeding expectations for a reintroduction of this kind. Even more encouraging, females have successfully produced litters of kittens in the wild in both 2024 and 2025, a sign that the released cats are not merely surviving but beginning to establish a self-sustaining population. A study published in a special edition of the IUCN’s Cat News concluded that breeding for release is an effective strategy for wildcat conservation.

“In response, the Saving Wildcats partnership, led by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, bred wildcats at a specialist release center at the Highland Wildlife Park and began returning them to the wild in the Cairngorms National Park in 2023.”

The project’s success rests on careful preparation and broad collaboration. The partnership brought together NatureScot, Forestry and Land Scotland, the Cairngorms National Park Authority, Nordens Ark in Sweden, and Junta de Andalucía in Spain, among others. Alongside the releases, the team worked with organizations such as Cats Protection to trap, neuter, vaccinate, and return more than a hundred domestic and feral cats in the area — a crucial step, since interbreeding with feral cats had been one of the biggest threats to the wildcat’s survival.

As Dr Helen Senn of RZSS noted, the effort has been groundbreaking as the first project in the UK to reintroduce a cat species, while NatureScot’s Dr Martin Gaywood said the team now has the science and evidence to back up the idea that wildcats can be restored through careful planning. Four more kittens were born in the breeding center during the year, all eligible for future release. For a species that had all but vanished from the British landscape, the sight of wild-born wildcat kittens prowling the Cairngorms is a hopeful sign that the Highland tiger may roam Scotland for generations to come.