Their greatest strength was also their greatest weakness, which is why modern big cats have smaller, sturdier teeth.
Saber-toothed cats — an umbrella term for a wide variety of felid species with massive, scimitar-like teeth — are some of the most terrifying prehistoric predators, carnivorousness incarnate.
But it turns out the teeth that give them their name and their fearsome reputation were also their greatest weakness.
The problem? While the oversized upper canines were optimal for delivering kill bites and tearing into flesh, they could break if the teeth met bone with force.
“Slicing and crushing are basically the two main things a carnivorous mammal’s teeth can do,” said Narimane Chatar, a postdoc at UC Berkeley studying carnivores. “But for saber-toothed animals, there’s a clear trade off. Those upper canines were extremely efficient but also break very easily.”
As experts on extant big cats are well aware, a hypercarnivore with broken or damaged fangs can struggle to take down their typical prey. That’s what often turns tigers, leopards and lions into man-eaters. (Interestingly, there are no documented accounts of man-hunting jaguars. Jaguar attacks on humans are exceedingly rare, and while they have killed humans, there’s no jaguar equivalent of the Chamapawat Tiger or the Leopard of Rudraprayag.)
A reconstruction of Smilodon, commonly known as the saber-toothed tiger, although it’s not closely related to modern tigers.A reconstruction of Megantereon, a saber-toothed cat that went extinct as late as 350,000 years ago.
During her research, Chatar found the skull and teeth of a saber-toothed cat in Berkeley’s archives and realized it was not the same species associated with saber-toothed cats in the Americas.
Although Smilodon and Homotherium are the most well-known species, “there was a crazy variety of saber-toothed cats,” Chatar said.
Her research has confirmed the prehistoric cat’s sword-like fangs were double-edged, literally and figuratively. Per UC Berkeley:
“In simulations, 3D-printed saber teeth from various species proved ideal at penetrating a gel with the consistency of flesh but fractured easily against simulated bone. In the former tests, Smilodon came out on top. In the latter, Smilodon fared the worst.“
Smilodon lived in the Americas and went extinct about 8,200 years ago. Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits have yielded a number of preserved skeletal remains, making Smilodon and its three sub-species among the best-known prehistoric felids.
Smilodon and Megantereon images via Wikimedia Commons.
The Youtuber known as Xing goes to extraordinary lengths to create scaled-down places for his cats to play and lounge in within his Cat Town.
Xing, the Youtuber who previously turned heads by building a working subway system for his cats, isn’t finished transforming his Cat Town into a one-of-a-kind extravagance for his little buddies.
The Youtuber’s latest creations are a 3,500-seat, air-conditioned, to-scale feline basketball arena with its own real hardwood court and a cat hotel.
Xing also showed off the exterior of Cat Town, which has a McDonald’s and several empty buildings.
He’s soliciting ideas from viewers on what he should build next. While I love the subway and the arena, I think he should try something a little more practical, something his cats will definitely use. The cat hotel is different, since it’s entirely possible one or more of his cats will use the hotel room as a private getaway, but it does raise an interesting question: what would a cat want?
For most cats, including Xing’s fluffy Maine Coon, a pool wouldn’t be a great choice, but what about a hot tub? A Japanese capsule-style hotel with cozy rooms that fulfill the feline desire for tight spaces? A bowling alley where cats can knock pins over to their hearts’ content? A town park? A golf course filled with sand traps for…uh, never mind that last idea.
Here are some shots of the hotel lobby, elevator and guest rooms:
And here’s Xing showing off the impressive scale of Cat Town. He says he’s got a lot more room to build, so we won’t see an end to these impressive projects any time soon.
The footballer stars in a TV series that calls cats “unwanted ecological trash” that can be repurposed as “culinary gold.” One cast member claims eating felines is a heroic endeavor: “In some cases you should and could eat it into eradication.”
Earlier this week we noted an Australian celebrity chef’s enthusiasm for eating a “pussycat sandwich,” but Maggie Beer isn’t the only famous Aussie who has raved about eating cats.
An Australian football (soccer) player, Tony Armstrong, spoke in glowing terms about eating cat meat in an interview with The Guardian a year ago, enthusing that it was “the yummiest.”
“We had it in the Western Desert and cooked it in a fire, wrapped in foil,” Armstrong told the newspaper. “It was like the most delicious rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had.”
Armstrong’s interviewer, Sian Cain, the Guardian’s deputy culture editor for Australia, didn’t bat an eye or consider the answer worthy of a follow-up question. She just moved on, asking him if rising early for “breakfast telly” was as difficult as keeping in shape for football.
Armstrong consumed the cat meat for his television show, Eat The Invaders, which casts it as an attempt to “turn our unwanted ecological trash into desirable culinary gold.”
That’s what the life of a cat is casually referred to in certain mainstream segments of Australian culture: “unwanted ecological trash.”
Armstrong and his castmates say they’re on a noble quest to eradicate invasive species by eating them.
As we noted in our post about Beer’s “pussycat sandwich,” the casual way this is talked about in Australia provides a window into the way some people there think about animal life in general and felines in particular.
Not all of them, of course. There are lots of people for whom the idea of eating intelligent companion animals is extremely disturbing. But the idea is widespread enough to make it onto mainstream Australian television without much of an uproar, undoubtedly because Australians are constantly told felines — not industrialization, pollution, pesticides, traffic collisions, man-made environmental hazards, and habitat loss — are almost solely responsible for declining populations of native fauna.
When the choice is between modifying our own behavior or blaming animals who cannot speak for themselves, it’s always easier to shift the blame than to, say, derail development projects or outlaw the use of harmful chemicals.
Just look at the decades-long controversy involving the weedkiller Roundup despite the damage it does to other plants, animals and the people working directly with the substance. Despite successful lawsuits on behalf of cancer patients and evidence that chemicals in the herbicide cause cancer, the EPA says it’s safe. Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides are widely used in Australia as well, but that fact is rarely raised in discussions about protecting native fauna and flora.
In a promo for Eating the Invaders, after blaming “colonial ancestors” for introducing non-native species and repeating the claim that cats kill 3 billion animals per year in Australia (an assertion for which there is no evidence), Armstrong casts himself as a crusader righting ecological wrongs.
“But what if we could help,” he asks in a voiceover, “by reimagining this problem as a tasty solution?”
In the series, Armstrong works with chef Vince Trim and “artist and curator” Kirsha Kaechele, who credits herself with staging “immersive feasts [that] transform invasive species into art.”
Armstrong, Kaechele and Trim. Credit: Eat The Invaders
Kaechele says she has no qualms about eating intelligent domesticated animals.
“In some cases you should and could eat it into eradication,” Kaechele says.
Just as there is no hard evidence that cats are the primary force behind species extinction, there is no data to support the idea that randomly killing and eating cats has any positive impact on species survival.
But eating cats isn’t just about saving the world, Kaechele explains. It’s about aesthetics as well.
“In these feasts,” she says, “every element has to be art.”
By that she means she fashions cutlery, centerpieces and containers from the deceased animals.
Kaechele is no stranger to controversy. As an amateur troll, she’s known for attention-grabbing stunts. She’s faced legal complaints for opening an Australian lounge/art gallery that admitted women only, “so men feel as excluded as possible,” and attended one of her subsequent hearings with 20 female supporters who dressed like her and moved in sync with her.
The appearance was “performance art,” she claimed. The judge disagreed, calling it a disrespectful display. Kaechele was also blamed for gentrifying a New Orleans neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina, snapping up and later allegedly abandoning five properties and allowing them to decay. They were subsequently taken over by squatters while Kaechele was MIA, presumably globetrotting and enlivening people’s drab existences by “transforming them into art.”
“Women are better than men in every respect,” Kaechele says in one video, echoing the provocateur Dick Masterson’s assertion that “men are better than women.”
The difference is that Masterson is a character created by a comedian. Whether individual people find his act amusing or not, Masterson performs for an audience of men and women who are well aware his schtick is tongue in cheek. Kaechele may or may not believe what she’s saying, but one thing she’s not doing is comedy. No one’s laughing.
She’s a deeply unserious person who shouldn’t be anywhere near any conversations about conservation.
As for Trim, he can’t bring himself to admit he’s cooking cats. To him, they’re no different than anything else in his fridge or pantry.
“It’s really exciting to be using a lot of these invasive ingredients that we have,” he said.
It’s one thing to consider the possibility that species like cats are signficant drivers of native species extinction, and another to prove they are measurable contributors compared to the hundreds of ways human behavior impacts animal life.
But you have to be really far up your own ass to keep a straight face while claiming you’re saving the world by eating cats, and even more divorced from reality to characterize it as a form of artistic expression.
Perhaps most concerning, telling people that cats are “yummy” could inspire others to try it for themselves, and turning it into a trend would be an entirely new level of barbarism.
Say what you will about people who participate in China’s infamous Yulin dog meat festival. At least they plainly admit they eat dogs and cats because they like the taste without clinging to any pretense that they’re creating high art or saving the planet.
The California man was hunting another animal when a herd of African elephants charged him and his professional guide.
The reaction to the trampling death of a “big game hunter” this month can be broken down to two main camps.
One side is in a celebratory mood, saying Ernie Dosio deserved to be trampled by African elephants on April 17 in Gabon, central Africa. His death was poetic justice, they say, delivered by animals of a species Dosio hunted, whose preserved and mounted heads he proudly displayed on his extensive trophy walls back home in California.
On the opposite end are people engaged in the hagiography of the 75-year-old business owner, describing him as a “pillar of the community” and a “great guy” who gave generously to charity.
We like our narratives black and white, our heroes and villains clearly delineated. To most people, Dosio was one or the other.
In reality, the two sides of Dosio are not mutually exclusive. It’s entirely possible he was a good member of the community who had compassion for people. It’s also true that contrary to claims that he was a “conservation hunter,” Dosio took pride in killing animals from critically endangered and protected species, like many who think their wealth entitles them to rob the Earth of wonderful and unique forms of life so they can collect trophies.
Dosio posing with an elephant he killed on an earlier trip.
Indeed, the concept of a “conservation hunter” is an oxymoron. The pro-hunting side says the fees hunters pay for licenses, guides and other services are crucial to fund conservation efforts.
The truth is that the majority of the money finds its way into the pockets of officials in kleptocracies. If the contributions of so-called conservation hunters are supposed to make a difference, then reality proves them to be an abject failure: population numbers for endangered species like elephants, lions, cheetahs and rhinos continue to trend down, and those species will be extinct in a decade or two if we don’t put a stop to poaching, hunting, habitat loss and other threats.
I also have a problem with calling these people hunters.
These men and women are not Jim Corbett roughing it on foot in the British Raj, using their skill and knowledge of the land to take out vicious man-eaters at great risk to themselves.
They are weekend warriors, wealthy tourists who pay tens of thousands of dollars to kleptocratic governments for their blessing to “harvest” the animals they kill. It’s big business: in South Africa alone, the trophy hunting industry brought in $120 million, according to a 2015 estimate. That number is likely considerably higher today.
When he was killed, Dosio was hunting for a yellow-backed duiker, a rare antelope listed as near-threatened on the IUCN red list. He paid Gabon’s government a $40,000 fee to “harvest” the animal.
Trophy hunters don’t stalk by moonlight, rifle in hand, looking for tracks and camping rough.
They are chauffeured around by hired drivers in comfortable, climate-controlled luxury off-road vehicles. They have servants who pitch their tents, cook their meals, light their fires and guard their camps.
They do not track their targets. They pay men to lure the unsuspecting creatures directly into their paths using food as a lure. The lions, leopards and other animals they kill don’t even realize they’re being hunted before the rifle shots end their lives.
Then the hunters retreat to the air-conditioned comfort of their vehicles while their hired servants do the dirty work of beheading the animals so they can be packed up, prepped for display and shipped back to the US, where they will join the heads of other animals killed by these wealthy men and women. Men and women who proudly show off their kills when they invite people to their homes, recounting their heroics to the bored guests, who make appropriately polite noises to pretend they’re impressed.
In addition to the 30 or so animals on display here, photos show the walls on the rest of Dosio’s home are covered with the preserved heads and bodies of animals he’s killed.
Nothing about this grotesque sequence of events resembles hunting. It is killing. It requires no skill, it carries no risk, its outcome is never in doubt, and it serves no purpose other than to pad the egos of people who have lots of disposable income and little self-confidence.
They have their defenders and their haters.
“I knew I was going to enjoy this,” one person wrote in response to a news story about Dosio’s demise.
“Do you think the elephants will mount his head on their walls?” another joked.
Some people speculated that the elephants, a species with notoriously long memories, may have remembered him from a prior encounter.
The more likely explanation is the elephants saw Dosio and one of his guides, both carrying weapons, as a threat to the calf they were protecting. Rather than put the baby and themselves at risk, they attacked first. If that’s the case, humans are at fault for that too, because the elephants know people carrying guns do not have good intentions. It may not have been Dosio who killed a member of that particular herd, but odds are overwhelming that someone has, and the elephants haven’t forgotten.
While celebrating Dosio’s death may provide a cheap dopamine hit and a sense of righteous justice, to be truly on the side of life means to value all forms of it, animal and human.
Dosio, 75, was reportedly a millionaire and owned a business that partnered with vineyards in California.
Celebrating Dosio’s demise means we’re no better than the “hunters” who grin like psychopaths for photos with the animals they’ve just killed. It makes those of us concerned about animal welfare and conservation look like extremists, and it only takes a few bad actors to wreck the efforts of an entire group. If a thousand protesters gather in a city square and two of them become violent, the resulting headlines will be about those two, not the 998 others who peacefully made their opinions known.
The way to fight back against trophy killing is by educating the public about the damage those killers do, by countering their claims that the fees they pay protect other animals, and by pointing out that without drastic intervention, elephants, lions and cheetahs will be nothing more than memories for a few generations, and near-myth to subsequent generations.
Killing, not hunting: this photo of an unnamed trophy hunter and his wife is instructive because it shows trophy “hunts” are never in doubt, never pose a risk to the “hunters,” and require no physical ability.
This also calls for self examination. On an Instagram account I made for Buddy, one I log into two or three times I year, I follow a handful of National Geographic photographers.
One of their images remains indelibly burned into my brain: a beautiful tiger cub, looking happy and full of curiosity about the world, gazing right at the camera. Even though I know I’m anthropomorphizing a bit, I can’t help feeling good about the expression on the young tiger’s face, an expression that looks like an enthusiastic grin. He is radiating joy at life.
And then I read the caption. This cub, this beautiful animal of a species that teeters on the edge of extinction, is growing up on a hunting reserve. His fate is already set. He will be killed, his life cut short by another weekend warrior paying to “harvest” him and mount his head on a wall so he can tell stories about his own bravery to bored friends and acquaintances.
That’s not just inhumane, it reveals something deeply disturbing about the kind of people who take pleasure from killing. Something primal, something that has no place in our civilization if we’re going to mature as a species, overcome our violent instincts, and have a future on this planet without destroying ourselves and taking every other form of life with it.
That’s why we need to be on the side of life. The alternative is reducing this garden world, this paradise, into a cold, lifeless rock.
The Gremlin-like felids have some unusual habits compared to other cats in addition to the trademark scowls that distinguish them from other feline species.
The fact that they live in burrows and crevices is the first indication that Pallas cats are the weirdos of the feline family.
The small, bushy little creatures greet the day by poking their heads out of their burrows just enough to see what’s going on. Thanks to the low profile of their ears, which stick out almost horizontally, only their eyes and tufts of frosty-looking fur are visible in those first moments.
When they’re satisfied nothing’s going to vex them further than their usual, seemingly perpetually-annoyed default, they fully emerge from their dens, and that’s when their true form becomes apparent.
Behold grumpiness incarnate:
“These kittens today, they want everything now. No patience and not a lick of common sense between ’em. Hey! Get off my lawn, you little cretins…” Credit: Wikimedia Commons“Would it kill these dogs to clean up after themselves? Sheesh! You don’t see me defecating all over everything. When nature calls, I do what civilized cats do, find a private spot and bury my business. Hey! Hey! Don’t you dare move that rock!”
These little guys look like they start every day off getting rained on while birds with impeccable aim empty their bowls on their heads. Then they file out, each one grumbling, and engage in their species’ favorite pastime — complaining about everything, like a perpetual Airing of Grievances on Festivus or a communal bitching session about joint pain at the local senior center.
“Oh, my back! For crying out loud! They couldn’t have dug this tunnel at a more forgiving angle? Aww crap, look at the weather! Hunting in this is gonna suck. Lenny, is there any more of the rabbit from last night? No? Of course not. And we’re out of coffee again! I don’t know why I even roll out of the burrow. This place is a dump!”
First observed and written about — in the western world, at least — by Peter Simon Pallas in 1776, Pallas cats are about the same size as our domestic feline buddies, but they look stockier thanks to their heavy coats. Pallas, a Prussian explorer and naturalist, was presumably going about his day when he heard a group of these malcontents complaining from a mile or two away.
“Whatchu lookin’ at?” Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Jokes aside, Pallas cats only look angry to us because we anthropomorphize them. Difficult as it is to believe with their convincing scowls, there’s no evidence to suggest they’re actually grumpy.
The fact that they sometimes co-occupy burrows means they have a cooperative and social component to their behavior that many cat species lack. You won’t find tigers cooperatively hunting, napping in communal burrows or padding out together to greet the crepuscular morning, but that’s what Pallas cats do. That’s a pretty good indication of a sunnier disposition than their trademark scowls indicate.
Here’s a remarkably clear and close video showing a Pallas cat mom poking her head out from a burrow and making sure the coast is clear before emerging with her four cubs close behind her:
Spread throughout mainland Asia, and concentrated most heavily in Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Bhutan and parts of China, individual Pallas cats move between different burrows and crevices depending on the need for cover and the season. They’re found on the vast plains of Mongolia, as well as in mountains like the Himalayas and the Altai range.
They usually top out at about 10 pounds and primarily hunt rodents, pikas, shrews and other small, ground- and underground-dwelling prey, but like most cats they’re adept ambush hunters and take opportunities where they find them.
Happily, and owing partly to their remote habitats, Pallas cats are one of the few wild species that are not listed as threatened or endangered on the IUCN Red List.
Header image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Proof they don’t scowl in every photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Pain In The Bud 