Felidae, Fischer de Waldheim, 1817

Voss, Robert S. & Fleck, David W., 2017, Mammalian Diversity And Matses Ethnomammalogy In Amazonian Peru Part 2: Xenarthra, Carnivora, Perissodactyla, Artiodactyla, And Sirenia, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2017 (417), pp. 1-1 : 1-

Felidae

Five species of felids are definitely known to occur in the Yavari-Ucayali interfluve, including the ocelot ( Leopardus pardalis ), the margay ( L. wiedii ), the jaguar ( Panthera onca ), the puma (Puma concolor), and the jaguarundi ( Pu. yagouaroundi ). Most Matses hunters recognize and name

all five of these confirmed local species of wild felids, which they include in the folk-taxonomic category bëdi. The term bëdi is polysemous: it can refer to the jaguar by default, to all felids (as a group name, or folk genus), or to any of the five local species of cats. However, wild dogs are also included in the bëdi group, and some Matses likewise include the tayra ( Eira barbara ). Bëdi also means “spotted” (or having a diamond pattern of spots), and seems to be a relatively new coinage (as it does not occur with the meaning of “jaguar” in other Panoan languages). Note that, despite this implication of spotting, bëdi can refer to animals with uniform coloration, like the jaguarundi, the short-eared dog, etc. Domestic cats, introduced to the Matses by American evangelical missionaries sometime after 1969, are called kidi kidi (an obvious corruption of “kitty kitty”), and they are also considered to be a type of bëdi.

Some Matses hunters claim that there is a sixth local wild felid species that they call cachu bëdi (the meaning of the word cachu is unknown), which is described as a very small ocelot. The Matses description suggests the oncilla ( Leopardus tigrinus ), but other hunters consider the cachu bëdi to be a synonym for the margay. Although L. tigrinus was reported from Jenaro Herrera by Pavlinov (1994), we have not examined the voucher specimen (in Moscow), and in the absence of other records of this species from northeastern Peru (Nascimento and Feijó, 2017), we are reluctant to include it here.

Matses interviews provide a unique source of information about the diets of sympatric Amazonian felids, which we have extracted from their accounts of both prey and predator taxa and tabulated for ease of interspecific comparisons ( table 11 ).