There's a big difference between sniffing each other through wire and the female accepting the male as a mate
Like I said, I've seen it happen a bunch of times with domestic cats (my first mother in law bred pedigreed Persians and they were cage kept). For whatever reason there were certain females just wouldn't go with certain males. They'd just fucking hated him. Maybe she'd tolerate his presence in the cage but the minute he tried to mount her all hell broke loose. In nature they'd go at each other and eventually the female would chase the male out of her territory. In a cage (or the zoo) there's nowhere for the male to go, he has to fight back and male cats outweight the females by a good bit.
I mean I'm just speculating here. There's so much abnormal behavior that crops up in zoo animals and so much natural behavior that just isn't known or understood. Took biologists a while to figure out that if a pair of clouded leopards aren't introduced well before they're 6 months old they'll consistently kill each other when they're put together to breed (usually around a year or so)? It's best if they're raised together, actually. It's impossible to observe them in the wild so how that shit works out in the jungle is anybody's guess.