August 10 is World Lion Day, dedicated to raising awareness about conservation issues affecting lions in the wild. Big cats appeal to us in large part because they have similarities to domestic cats. indeed, there are significant ways in which lions are more like domestic cats than other wild cats, but there are also some interesting differences. we talked to john bradshaw, author of the book cat sense, about how your cat is, and isn’t, like a lion.
feline society
There are only two species of cat in which females raise their young together: the lion and the house cat, says bradshaw. lions live in prides where females care for their cubs together. similarly, when cats live alone outdoors, three or four females will put their kittens in a nest that they all defend. The mother cats will also go hunting and bring back food that will allow them to eat all the kittens. breeders and rescuers can make use of this behavior by placing orphaned kittens or those whose mothers are in milk shortage with another lactating female. “What they’re taking advantage of is the fact that mother cats basically don’t seem to recognize their own kittens, which is unusual,” says Bradshaw.
however, the social life of domestic cats and lions differs from the male side. “In lions, the males also cooperate,” Bradshaw says. “It is virtually unheard of for male domestic cats to cooperate.” Although we think a male lion is in charge, Bradshaw says a pride actually includes a group of males, usually closely related to each other but not to the females. “The reason they are in a group is to defend those females from other groups of males,” he says. that defense is important for the survival of the pack; When a new group of males takes over, says Bradshaw, “the first thing they do is kill all the cubs. [the new males] know that they are not theirs, because they have just arrived and they want the females to reproduce again as soon as possible so that they can produce their own young.”
For big cats, that social cooperation extends to hunting as well: while domestic cats hunt alone, lions often hunt together. “It’s mostly the females that do it,” says Bradshaw, “and the males go along with them and take the best bits after the females have done all the work.” According to Bradshaw, those different hunting styles are related to the different types of prey that domestic cats and lions eat. “The reason lions have the luxury of being social is that they have the ability to hunt very large animals that will feed several lions for a day or two,” she says. domestic cats probably never developed cooperative hunting due to their small size; even in groups, they could not compete with larger predators, so they were left to hunt small prey alone.
social habits
We can think of lions as diurnal animals (they’re always active during the day at nature shows), while house cats certainly seem annoyingly nocturnal when they knock things off your dresser at 2am. m., that is more or less true. , but neither cat is completely locked into a schedule. “Most cats are pretty flexible about whether they’re diurnal or nocturnal, because they’re adjusting to their prey, the weather, and the time of year,” Bradshaw explains.
but you can see their different tendencies reflected in their anatomy. large eyes are a clue that an animal hunts at night, and the cat’s eyes are much larger in proportion to the head than the eyes of lions, which tend to hunt by day. “Cats are descended from animals that tend to hunt at night,” Bradshaw says. “Lions hunt and move at night—people on safari will tell you that lions roar at night—but, generally speaking, they hunt most of the time during the day, and the way they build their vision makes it so. indicates. ”
On the other hand, there are also similarities between big and small cats. Do you know when your cat rubs your head? lions do it too, not with people, of course, but with each other. “In general, it is assumed that some odor is deposited, but the significance is not very well understood,” Bradshaw says. you’ll see it when a lion returns to the group, and it appears to be a friendly greeting that reinforces the family bond. the gesture does not occur in other cats except between kittens in a litter or between a kitten and its mother. “Most of this social behavior evolved from bits of behavior that, in the rest of the cat family, are ways mother and offspring bond with each other,” he says.
Finally, both cats and lions love catnip and they’re not the only ones. “virtually the entire cat family responds to catnip,” says bradshaw. some individual cats go crazy over things, while others don’t react at all, and the same goes for lions – sensitivity seems to be more or less randomly inherited. for those that do react, he says, both species exhibit exactly the same type of behavior, “rolling around in the grass and apparently going into a trance.”
big cat, little cat
In addition to their size, lions and cats are physically different in some important ways. on the one hand, the lions roar and do not purr; cats purr and cannot roar. that’s because the anatomy of their throats is different. Although so familiar, the purr was long a scientific mystery. once thought to be caused by rumbling blood in the chest, we now know that purring comes from the larynx, and close examination of an ultrasound scan shows that there is a subtle difference in the sound of inhalation and exhalation. lions have an additional rigid structure in the throat that prevents purring but allows them to roar.
Like cats, lions’ claws are what people often call “retractile,” though Bradshaw says it’s more correct to call them protractile: their resting position is in, and muscles push them out when necessary. why? compare them to another cat, the cheetah. “The cheetah is unusual in that it’s a running animal, more like a dog,” says Bradshaw. “The claws can’t retract, so they wear out all the time.” Protruding claws help with traction when running, but for lions and house cats, it’s important to keep your tools in good condition. “They keep them in all the time because they use them for hunting and they need to keep them sharp,” he says.
cats, lions, and many other animals have what bradshaw likes to call a “second nose.” That extra nose, the vomeronasal organ on the roof of the mouth, analyzes chemicals in the air in the same way that the human nose does. If you’ve ever been taken aback when your cat pauses and makes a funny face, you’re probably seeing what’s called the flehmen response, which occurs when an animal is using that organ. but you may not have noticed it because it is much less obvious in cats than in lions. “The entire upper lip is lifted and the teeth are exposed, and the lion almost goes into a trance,” he says, as can be seen in this video. “Once you’ve seen it in a lion, it’s easier to recognize it in your cat.”
lions, house cats, and all other felines are obligate carnivores and depend on meat much more strictly than other carnivore families. pandas are descended from carnivores but only eat bamboo, while dogs actually digest grain better than wolves, a change that occurred in the course of their domestication. “But both lions and domestic cats are locked into a carnivorous lifestyle,” Bradshaw says, suggesting that they may have a more limited ability to utilize certain plant materials in their diet.
Because her digestive system and metabolism are unusual in that regard, you can’t feed your cat a vegetarian diet, and, she says, “there couldn’t be a pacifist lion.” a lion could not raise his hand and say: ‘I am not going to kill anymore, I am going to eat grass’. he just doesn’t have the equipment in his body to do it.” cats need so much protein that without it they quickly start to go to waste. “If we lack protein, we only use carbohydrates,” he says. “If you restrict the protein a cat or a lion gets, all they can do is start digesting their own muscles. they can’t help but break down proteins.”
source: www.vetstreet.com/
