WILD COUSINS OF THE CAT

Alice Hopf's profiles of the wild cats rely almost entirely on readily available published sources. Aside from an understandable fondness for anecdotes of pet cheetahs and ocelots--Desmond Varaday's Gara-Yaka, Charles Sweeney's servile Dindi, Hopf chooses her excerpts intelligently, relying especially on George Schaller's intimate observations of Serengeti lions and other big cats and citing Theodore Bailey's study of American bobcats which showed that they are actually helpful to sheep ranchers. A competent compilation.