Cats of all kinds are at risk of avian flu infection if they hunt birds outdoors, consume raw meat or drink unpasteurized milk.
In a tragedy that underscores how vulnerable cats of all types are to bird flu, more than half the big cats residing at a sanctuary in Washington were killed by the virus in less than a month.
Twenty cats in total died at the Wild Felid Advocacy Center, including five servals, four bobcats, two Canada lynx and a Bengal tiger.
Only 17 cats are left at the sanctuary, according to its operators.
Mark Matthews, the sanctuary director, called the H5N1 avian influenza a “wicked virus” that killed the cats in his organization’s care within 24 hours of each animal contracting it.
“We’ve never had anything like this,” Matthews said, adding that he and his staff are accustomed to cats in their care dying of old age after living long, happy lives.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Dec. 18 after infected birds were found at more than two thirds of the state’s dairy producers.
California’s dairy industry has been hit hard by the spread of bird flu, with more than half the state’s dairy producers impacted. Credit: Ralf R/Pexels
As of Dec. 26, bird flu had infected 65 Americans, the majority in California.
And the virus has now resulted in its first pet food recall, with Northwest Naturals pulling its turkey recipe “raw diet” food. A cat in Oregon died after consuming the food, according to the Oregon Agriculture Department.
As we noted in our earlier post about the variant of avian influenza, there’s no reason to panic. Even if you live on the west coast, the chances of your cats being infected are small.
But it’s probably a good idea to make sure your cats remain indoors, as health authorities warn cats can contract the virus directly by catching and eating birds. In one case, health officials believe three indoor cats may have caught the virus after killing mice in their home.
In addition, the American Veterinary Medical Association advises caretakers to avoid giving their cats milk, which they should not be drinking anyway, and raw meat. Domestic cats are generally lactose intolerant, and while cats can be infected with bird flu by eating raw poultry, they can also contract the virus by eating raw meat from other animals.
For the first time, humans have successfully returned orphaned tiger cubs to the wild after raising them and training them to hunt.
For more than 50 years, tigers were absent from Russia’s Pri-Amur region.
Sparsely-populated, mountainous and blanketed in forest, the domain borders the heart of the Russian Far East, offering hundreds of thousands of contiguous square miles for the most robust sub-species of Earth’s most magnificent predator.
Here, tigers can roam without fear of conflict with local farmers, or roads that carve up habitat and pose a danger to animals trying to cross. Prey is abundant, and adaptations for surviving in the local terrain are coded into the tigers’ DNA.
Now that scientists have proven for the first time that tigers can be successfully reintroduced into such an environment, big cat advocates imagine Russia’s Far East as a haven for the large felids. It’s a place where tigers can thrive, mate, reproduce and change the outlook for their species, which has dwindled to only 4,000 or so remaining in the wild.
Credit: Leon Aschemann/Pexels
The project to reintroduce Amur tigers to their native habitat is a cooperative Russian-American endeavor. The team started by building a tiger conservation center in the Amur oblast a decade ago.
The facility is built in a way that orphaned tigers can be raised and taught how to hunt without directly interacting with their human caretakers. That’s a crucial component, because tigers who see humans as potentially friendly or sources of food have drastically reduced chances of surviving in the wild, and are easier marks for poachers.
After 18 months, the cubs are brought to remote locations in Pri-Amur and released. Of the first group of orphan tigers released into the wild, 12 were able to survive on their own.
One gluttonous tiger failed: he crossed over the border into China and began eating domesticated animals, including 13 goats in what researchers called “a single event.”
The fattened tiger then retraced his steps to Pri-Amur, and when he didn’t show fear of humans, the team decided he had to go. They captured him and sent him to a zoo, where he gets all the free meals he wants and contributes to the captive breeding program helping his species maintain genetic diversity.
With 12 out of 13 tiger re-introductions successful, the program provides “a pathway for returning tigers to large parts of Asia where habitat still exists but where tigers have been lost,” said Viatcheslav V. Rozhnov, who leads the reintroduction project.
Amur tigers are the largest cats on Earth. They’ve evolved to survive in regions where winters can be brutally cold and snowy, but they also thrive in spring and summer when the snows melt and prey is abundant. Credit: Pexels
The successful reintroduction has also led to some surprising developments. Two of the cubs, Boris and Svetlaya, were unrelated but were rescued at about the same time and raised in the Russian orphanage for their species.
Using tracking devices they’d placed on the newly-released young tigers, the research team watched as Svetlaya settled into a home range and Boris made a beeline for her, “almost in a straight line,” crossing 200km (120 miles) of terrain to reunite.
The team’s hopes were confirmed six months later, when Svetlaya gave birth to a healthy litter of cubs, the first natural-born tigers to result from the reintroduction project.
Another tigress, Zolushka, also gave birth to a healthy litter when she was reintroduced in an area closer to a still-extant population of Amur tigers. The researchers believe the father was born wild in the region and was not part of the reintroduction program.
The wilderness in Pri-Amur and its environs is so vast, untouched and undesirable to human habitation that it could be home to generations of tigers, securing their future after so many decades of grim news for the iconic big cats.
“The grand vision is that this whole area would be connected,” Luke Hunter, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Big Cats Program. “There’s lots of habitat that could be recolonized by tigers.”
A Yougov survey of Americans produced some hilarious results when respondents were asked how they’d fare in hypothetical combat.
In the opening scene of Netflix’s Afraid, a woman is using her iPad in bed when she asks her husband: “Did you know six percent of Americans believe they could beat a grizzly bear in a fight?”
I had to pause the movie right there and see if there was any truth to the claim. Sure enough, in a Yougov survey from 2021, titled “Rumble In The Jungle,” six percent of respondents — almost entirely men — said they could defeat a grizzly bear unarmed.
Grizzly bears top out at more than 2,000 pounds, can crush bowling balls with their paws and have claws the size of large knives. They’re also extraordinarily well-protected, with heavy fur and fat protecting their vital organs. If you think you can harm one unarmed, let alone kill it, well, good luck with that.
Incredibly, eight percent said they could defeat a lion, gorilla or elephant, while 17 percent thought they could take on a chimpanzee. Again, the respondents who liked their own odds against extraordinarily lethal animals were almost exclusively men. The survey doesn’t say what they were smoking when they responded.
Domestic cats fared poorly in the imaginations of Americans: 69 percent thought they could defeat the little stinkers in hypothetical battles. Only rats fared worse, with 72 percent sure of victory in unarmed single combat.
“This is really an insult to felines,” said Buddy the Cat, a combatologist at Buddesian University. “However, we jaguars fared much better, as we were projected to win about two-thirds of hypothetical fights against other animals, including elephants, rhinos and tigers. Personally I think it’s closer to 99 percent, but I won’t protest. It’s better for us if we’re underestimated.”
He chalked human overconfidence up to the fact that people are “bizarre creatures who live in a fantasy world,” and have “an unfulfilled yearning to be something more than our servants.”
“They don’t have the claws, teeth or, like, the muscle fibers we do,” he explained. “Those advantages make it possible for me to kill a caiman with a single bite or tear an anaconda apart in seconds. Jaguar means ‘He who kills with one leap,’ did you know that? Yeah, it’s pretty badass.”
This singular species of wildcat exists only on two islands and has evolved to live a semi-arboreal existence deep in the jungle.
While tigers, lions and domestic cats are the stars of the felid world and command the lion’s share (pun intended) of the attention, even from cat lovers, there are obscure species living in far-off locations where they’re rarely glimpsed by human eyes.
There’s the fishing cat, the black-footed cat and the sand cat, and then there are species that are obscure even among the obscure. The Sunda clouded leopard fits into that category, inasmuch as the unique felid can fit into any category.
Like orangutans, the Sunda clouded leopard can be found in only two places in the world: the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra. They’re faced with the same existential threat that has pushed orangutans dangerously close to extinction, which is the relentless destruction of old-growth jungle to clear land for more palm oil plantations.
The species has an incredibly long tail that can match or exceed the length of its body. The large tail is crucial in a jungle environment, where it acts as a counterbalance high above the ground. Credit: Panthera
Palm oil is coveted by multinational corporations in the food and cosmetics businesses, and it’s in everything from chocolate and instant noodles to lipstick and margarine, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
The problem with razing old growth jungle and forest is that it doesn’t just grow back. They’re extremely delicate ecosystems that have arrived at a natural balance over thousands of years, with every species of animal and plant contributing something vital to the vibrant tapestry of life the jungles host and support. You can’t just plant trees and usher animals to a new home. It would take hundreds of years for those new jungles to even superficially resemble the lifegiving old growth jungle.
There are heartbreaking images of shocked orangutans sitting in the ruins of their former homes, with nothing but the stumps of trees and dozer-trodden vegetation as far as the eye can see.
Those are the lucky ones. The loggers who work for massive multinational corporations aren’t bound by rules or ethics, and they won’t wait for animals to clear out before they destroy. They often shoot orangutans on sight regardless of whether the animals are carrying young.
Roux, a baby orangutan in a “boot camp” for orphans, learns how to walk. Credit: Phys.org
That’s the primary reason why Borneo and Sumatra are now home to entire academies for orangutan orphans, who spend at least eight years learning how to fend for themselves with the help of specialists who teach lessons that would normally be taught by the orphan orangutans’ mothers. They include the very basics, like how to move and climb through the jungle, as well as crucial information such as which berries to avoid while foraging.
While there’s no “academy” for clouded leopards and the felids are more adept at avoiding human wrecking crews, they’ve suffered the same fate as orangutans when it comes to dwindling jungles.
This is the situation Sunda clouded leopards find themselves in, so when a trail camera recently captured footage of a mother and her two cubs, conservationists were thrilled.
The footage comes from camera traps belonging to the Orangutan Foundation, and it’s the first time anyone’s managed to obtain video of the Bornean clouded leopards with cubs in tow. The brief video shows the little family bounding through the jungle. They quickly move past the camera, but not before one of the cubs stops to look right at it with typical kitten curiosity.
Sunda clouded leopards are extraordinary cats. Size-wise, they are firmly in the “medium size wildcat” category, with males weighing about 50 pounds. Despite that, they are members of pantherinae, the genus of big cats, having diverged from a common ancestor shared with tigers, leopards, lions and jaguars.
As further proof of their in-between status, Sunda clouded leopards can neither purr nor roar. Typically, each species of felid can do one or the other. Even the species’ scientific nomenclature, neofelis nebulosa, references its intermediate status. (If you encounter alternate taxonomy for them, it’s because the clouded leopards of Borneo and Sumatra are considered distinct subspecies.)
“Due to a different bone structure in their neck, the clouded leopard cannot roar like the larger cats, but also cannot purr because it lacks the fully ossified hyoid bone that allows small cats this ability,” the Smithsonian National Zoo’s keepers explain.
Sunda clouded leopards have several unique adaptations that allow them to thrive in arboreal environments. Their massive tails act as crucial counterweights, allowing them to traverse branches high above the ground without falling. Their paws and paw pads are specialized for gripping tree branches, and their ankles can articulate in ways other felid ankles cannot, allowing the jungle-dwelling wildcats to descend from trees head-first.
Domestic cats infamously lack this adaptation, which is why firefighters are also part-time cat rescuers, coaxing the terrified little ones down from trees, utility poles and rooftops.
Credit: Panthera
The clouded leopards of Borneo and Sumatra are also undeniably cute. People have noticed, which is why one of Google’s auto-complete suggestions for Sunda clouded leopard suggests the word “pet” as an addition. It’s okay to fantasize about having a clouded leopard buddy, but in addition to the fact that they are endangered, they’re also wild animals.
Consider the fact that across the estimated 200,000 years of our species’ existence, homo sapiens have domesticated precisely one felid species, and even that’s not entirely accurate. Felis catus played just as much of a role — and arguably more — than humans did in their own domestication. As predators and obligate carnivores, they are unique among domestic animals, and it took and equally unique set of circumstances to bring cat and man together.
Instead of lamenting the fact that Sunda clouded leopards can’t be pets, we can admire them in the best way possible, from a distance, while helping ensure the survival of this extraordinary, distinctive species by donating to groups like Panthera, the WWF and Global Conservation.
The trail camera is operated by a team studying the behavior of wolves, but this felid became the main character for a short while, posing majestically right in front of the lens.
Happy Monday! We’re starting the week off in style with an amazing video courtesy of the Voyageurs Wolf Project.
As its name implies, the project is a collaboration between wildlife biologists, ecologists and academics to learn more about wolves, specifically how they survive in the summer months.
While there’s a wealth of research on the behavior of wolves during winter, the pack animals go their separate ways in the warm weather to raise newborn cubs and hunt smaller prey.
Because it’s much more difficult to track individual wolves under the cover of heavy brush compared to following entire packs in the snow, the project relies on a combination of GPS collars and trail cameras. The latter pick up all sorts of wildlife in the Minnesota wilderness, which is how the Voyageurs Wolf Project captured this clear, close-up footage of a stunning medium size wild cat:
We captured some really neat footage of lynx this past year on our cameras but this is definitely the coolest. In fact, might be the best video of a lynx we have ever captured, not least because the lynx decided sit right in front of the camera…
— Voyageurs Wolf Project (@VoyaWolfProject) July 31, 2024
That’s lynx canadensis, better known as the Canadian lynx, and the footage is so perfect it’s as if the wild cat said “Ah, a trail camera! I’m gonna sit right here and let the humans see how beautiful and regal I am!”
From its pronounced ear tufts to its snow-soft fur and dark stump of a tail, this lynx is a fantastic example of its species. Canadian lynx are well adapted to the demands of their environs in Canada and the northern US, with heavy coats and soft, wide feet that allow it to traverse snowy landscapes quickly and silently.
They’re famously elusive and difficult to track in the wild, but maybe all we have to do is give the lynx a chance to strut its stuff.
Top image credit Carlos Delgado/Wikimedia Commons.
Pain In The Bud 