(or Pallas’s cat; Felis [Otocolobus] manul), a predatory mammal of the family Felidae. It is about the size of a house cat and has dense, fluffy, brownish yellow fur, with dark transverse stripes on the rear half of the body and the tail. The ears are small and rounded; the hair on the cheeks is long. The manul is found in Central Asia. In the USSR, it inhabits southern Transcaucasia, Middle Asia and the southern Altai, the southern part of the Tuva ASSR, and Transbaikalia. It lives in hilly steppes containing rock streams (outliers of rocks), on mountain steppes, and in semideserts. Their numbers are small every-where. The manul hunts chiefly at dusk and at night, preying on rodents, birds, and lizards. Manuls are trapped in small quantities for their fur.