The question in the title is asking how many species of small wild cat there are plus the domestic cat. My book on the small wild cats by Jim Sanderson and Patrick Watson says this:
Scientists now recognise 36 species of wild cats. The number increases to 37 if the domestic cat is included as a separate species. Of these 30 are small cats.
Small Wild Cats
The number 30 is probably in dispute because if you go onto a major website about the wild cat species on the Internet, they say that there are 33 species of small wild cat.
The reason for this discrepancy – and you will see discrepancies about the number of small cats on the planet – is because the classification of the cat species (taxonomy) is still in flux to a certain extent. It is settled largely but there are still some disputed areas as to how you classify the small cats.
I guess the answer to the question in the title is there are 30-33 kinds of small cats on the planet. To which you should always include the domestic cat because it is often or normally classified with the wild cat species. This is because the domestic cat is very similar almost identical to their wild cat ancestor the North African wildcat.
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Back in the day when the wild cat species were first being classified by appearance only, there was some confusion about their number. This came about because some species have different colour variants depending upon the seasons and depending upon their geographic distribution.
So, there was a time when scientists believed there were many more small wild cat species because they looked different but they weren’t different species when you drilled down to their DNA which can be done nowadays. It is much more accurate to classify the cat species with the assistance of the greatly expanded field of molecular genetics. Genetic material from different species can be analysed with a range of molecular tests to determine how closely the species are related to one another.
The differences are sometimes small because the cat family evolved very recently and because some species separated from others within a short period of time.
The authors of the respected book on the wild cats, Wild Cats of the World, by Mel and Fiona Sunquist, states that, even as recently as 2002, they created a ‘best guess tree’ of the eight major lineages of the wild cat species. You can see a version of that below.
As you can see, a large part of this article is justifying the remaining slight uncertainty on the different kinds of small cats present in the world today. For instance, Jim Sanderson writes in the above-mentioned book that:
“The placement of many species of wild cats in the Felidae family tree continued to confound the very best scientists into the late 1980s. Deciding if a wild animal is a wild cat is fairly easy, even for the casual observer, but deciding which species a particular wild cat is can prove a very frustrating task. Identification of some species is extremely difficult and continues to confound wild cat authorities.”
One reason he states that is there are variations in the anatomy of cats depending upon the distance from the equator where they are found. What he means there is that the weight of cats diminishes in warmer climates and increases in colder climates in order to retain heat.
Here is another representation of the wild cats and the place of the domestic cat in their classifications.
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