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Newborn baby sand cat totally melts hearts across Japan【Video】

Watch out for cute overload as Kobe Animal Kingdom reveals videos and photos of their new baby sand cats!

Kobe Animal Kingdom, a zoological and botanical park located in Hyogo Prefecture in the Kansai region, recently announced the happy news that a male baby sand cat was born on their grounds on August 23.

Sand cats are a small species of wild cat that live in the desert in areas ranging from northern Africa to western and central Asia, and their small, adorable appearance has earned them the nickname “angel of the desert” with animal lovers in Japan, so you can imagine how sweet they would look as babies.

Sure enough, while we’ve seen our share of cute animal videos and photos, when we checked out the images released by Kobe Animal Kingdom we were quite at a loss for words to express how devastatingly adorable the baby sand cat is.

So tiny and furry …. we can easily see how it was given the nickname of an “angel.” When the baby sand cat was born, it was just 15 centimeters (6 inches) long and weighed only 59.6 grams (2.1 ounces).

▼ This shows the baby sand cat’s face being wiped after it was fed milk.

▼ A tweet on September 4 shows the cat’s right eye barely open. Isn’t that just darling? According to the information released by the park, both eyes opened the following day, at 13 days old.

As it so happens, the mother in this case has abandoned taking care of the baby cat, so the kitten  is being hand raised by the park staff.

Fortunately, the baby sand cat is feeding and growing well. Kobe Animal Kingdom is only the second zoo in Japan to be rearing a newborn sandcat, following its affiliate Nasu Animal Kingdom, which welcomed a baby sand cat earlier this year in April, followed by three more kittens in July. Kobe Animal Kingdom’s newborn sand cat, which hasn’t been given a name yet, is the first to be born at the facility.

Kobe Animal Kingdom haven’t yet announced when they will start showing the baby cat to the public, so we’ll be looking forward to that information when it comes out. Until then, we can be purrr-fectly happy watching the videos and photos they share on their various social media outlets.

▼ Here’s a video posted on Kobe Animal Kingdom’s YouTube channel eight days after the sand cat was born. Just lovely!

And if you’ve fallen in love with sand cats with the notion that they’d make an adorable pet, you’ll want to heed this message on Kobe Animal Kingdom’s website: “Sand cats are wild animals. Although they may look very cute, they have sharp fangs and an aggressive nature and are not suitable as pets. Please do not think of keeping them as pets.” Yup, we’ll keep that in mind.

Source: Kobe Animal Kingdom website, Twitter/@kobe_doubutsu, YouTube/Kobe Animal Kingdom
Top image: YouTube/Kobe Animal Kingdom
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