Angry locals say they’ll kill the tiger if forest rangers do not after the predator ambushed and ate a mother of two in southern India on Friday.
Forest rangers are on the hunt to capture a man-eating tiger who killed a woman and dragged her body into a forest on Friday, while frustrated locals say they’ll destroy the predator if the government does not.
The victim, a 45-year-old woman named Radha, was employed by a local coffee plantation in Mananthavady and was harvesting coffee beans when the big cat ambushed her, according to multiple reports in local media. Mananthavady is a city of about 47,000 people in southern India surrounded by rural farmland.
A Thunderbolt team — a special forces unit trained in counter-insurgency — was patrolling the area when they found blood and signs of a struggle. They followed the tiger’s pug marks into a nearby forest, where they found Radha’s body “half eaten,” the New Indian Express reported.
The attack and the livid response of people in the area highlight the conflicts that India must manage as it works to save tigers, the country’s critically endangered national animal, while also protecting the public. India’s government has relocated thousands of families away from the vast country’s 27 tiger preserves, but the big cats are oblivious to the boundaries of the preserves.
Earlier this month, people living in several contiguous towns over a stretch of more than 130 miles in eastern India barricaded themselves indoors, refusing to leave for work or to travel to local markets, after a pair of hungry tigers had drifted off a preserve and had begun to feast on local livestock.
A tiger who was seized and relocated from a roadside zoo operated by Joseph “Tiger King” Maldonado-Passage. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
In Mananthavady, locals threatened a hartal, a form of strike aimed at gaining concessions from the government, if the tiger is not killed. Forest rangers and local government leaders said they would capture and relocate the tiger, who has been spotted on a trail camera, but the locals say that’s not good enough.
“If you can’t shoot the tiger, then shoot us instead,” one protester told forestry officials.
Others said they’d take matters into their own hands if authorities don’t kill the tiger. It’s not an empty threat: in 2019, a mob of enraged villagers beat a tigress to death after she attacked a person.
Radha was the third person to be killed by tigers in the area since 2023, when two farmers were killed by the endangered apex predators in incidents about 11 months apart.
In addition to the anger and grief felt by family and friends of the victims, the government’s compensation program is also controversial. Radha’s family will receive ₹11 lakh, according to reports, which was about $12,800 in USD according to exchange rates on Jan. 25.
The program has been condemned by people who say the government is wrong to put an arbitrary monetary value on human life, and in recent years there have been attempts to provide families with resources like job training in addition to monetary compensation. The issue remains a sore spot and a topic of ongoing litigation because the government did not compensate victim families for decades, and does not automatically provide compensation if the victims trespass onto preserve land.
Tigers are the largest and most dangerous of all cat species, and are arguably the most dangerous land animal on the planet, but the vast majority of them do not attack humans and give people a wide berth. Unlike most other felids, they enjoy water and swimming, especially in warm climates. Credit: Warren Garst/Wikimedia Commons
In the meantime, a team comprised of rangers, veterinarians, expert trackers and others — totaling about 100 people — was racing to get to the tiger before the mobs do, utilizing drones, traps and thermal imaging cameras to find and capture the elusive predator.
“The animal is still roaming in the same vicinity, and we are strengthening local patrols to prevent further casualties,” KS Deepa, chief conservator of forests in the region, told local media.
Most tigers who turn man-eater do so because they can no longer take down their usual prey without difficulty, either due to old age or because their teeth are damaged. The infamous Champawat tigress, who killed 436 people during a decade-long reign of terror from the late 1890s through 1907, turned man-eater when a hunter’s bullet shattered one of her canines.
It’s wasn’t clear what forestry officials planned to do with the tiger if it’s captured, but they told reporters they are forbidden by law from killing the animal unless other options are exhausted.
“There are three ways to capture the tiger,” A.K. Saseendran, India’s minister of forests and wildlife, told The Hindu. “We will try to cage it as the first step. If that fails, we will try to tranquilize it and move it out of Wayanad. Killing the tiger is the last resort.”
People who frequent cat cafes say they feel relaxed among the little ones. Hundreds of thousands of felines find their forever homes via cafes in the US, which are typically integrated with local shelter and rescue networks.
You may have noticed that most journalists don’t actually interview anyone these days, and the majority of “news” stories are either rewrites or lazily-assembled, 300-word virtual birdcage liners about which celebrity or influencer is “clapping back” at haters for “throwing shade” at them, with quotes directly copied and pasted from X or Instagram.
It’s cheap, easy content — far cheaper than funding war correspondents or impactful investigative journalism — and it doesn’t require reporters to leave their desks, speak to sources on the phone, or even fact-check what they’re writing.
“Well, they said it” is good enough for modern newsrooms, which is why we can’t have a national story or a disaster like the wildfires without waves of misinformation getting amplified by press and influencers alike. And the executives of the handful of remaining news companies wonder why trust in media is at historically low levels.
So these days, a veterinarian warning about laser toys via a TikTok video is considered international news. Nina Downing, a veterinarian with UK pet charity PDSA, took to the social media platform to warn about “laser pointer syndrome,” which she says can result in obsessive compulsive behavior in cats and dogs.
Our furry friends can become frustrated that they never actually capture the elusive red dot, according to proponents of the theory, and too much laser pointer play can result in a pet who barks at shadows or tries to tackle anything that moves.
“Cats have a hunting sequence to follow which is replicated in play, however if it doesn’t come to a successful capture at the end, this can cause them to become really agitated,” Downing warns.
Credit: WIkimedia Commons
Happily, Buddy is impervious to this alleged syndrome because he doesn’t actually have a “hunting sequence.” Born indoors, he’s known nothing but warmth and comfort, and food is something that’s served to him on a precise schedule, not something that needs hunting.
Accordingly, when we play with wand toys, Bud’s version of a “kill” is to grab the plush toy or feathers while dancing around on his back paws. He bobbles the toy while he dances, lets it go and resets the game.
The concept of a kill bite is completely alien to him, and apparently not even his feline instincts are enough to tell him there’s another step to “winning” the game. Still, I tell him he’s a good boy and a fierce little tiger because we can’t have fragile egos getting bruised.
That said, if you find lasers are one of the few reliable ways to get your kitty moving, it’s probably a good idea to wind down by switching to a wand toy. Let the little one simulate a kill, get a few rabbit kicks in and feel like a champ. There’s little or no research supporting the concept of laser pointer syndrome, but it still couldn’t hurt to give your feline overlord something tangible to “kill” at the end of a play session.
Cat cafes are more popular than ever in the US
USA Today has a story today about the apparent ubiquity of cat cafes in the US, and how they’re changing things for the better, for felines as well as people.
Using data from Yelp, the newspaper found there were 200 cat cafes, give or take, across the country at the end of 2024, up from about 75 in 2020.
“When we started, people weren’t quite sure what they were, there was a lot of explaining how they worked and what they were,” said Laura Konawalik, owner of a chain of three cafes featuring felines in North Carolina. “Nowadays people come in knowing the general concept.”
The same data shows searches for strings like “cat cafes near me” have increased 78,700% between February of 2020 and February of 2024, USA Today reported.
Patrons playing with cats at a cafe in Osaka, Japan. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
While cafes in some other countries are populated by felines owned by the proprietors, most cat cafes in the US are integrated with their local shelter and rescue networks, so patrons can adopt if they fall in love with the little ones they meet while having a cup of coffee or tea.
That means some of the oldest cat cafes in the country have facilitated thousands of adoptions and continue to find forever homes for their animals.
About 330,000 cats were euthanized in the US in 2023, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available, according to Shelter Animals Count, a national database that keeps track of shelter intakes and cat/dog euthanasia figures. Data for the first half of 2024 showed a decrease from the previous year’s numbers, but numbers from the latter half aren’t available yet.
Jet Taylor, a regular at Konawalik’s Mac Tabby cafes, says he keeps coming back to destress and feel calm.
“I would be willing to bet,” he said, “you could put a heart rate monitor on me and when I’m sitting there petting a cat, my heart rate goes down.”
Once again, we’ve underestimated cats. There’s so much more to the ways in which they communicate than we realize.
We know cats use non-verbal signals to communicate with each other, but recent research suggests we may just be scratching the surface, glimpsing only a portion of the information that passes between our furry friends.
Cats “talk” to each other by the way they position their tails, whiskers and ears, in addition to their overall body language.
It turns out there’s more. A group of interdisciplinary scientists from universities in Kansas, Arkansas and Haifa, Israel, found cats also employ specific facial expressions, and rapidly mirror each other’s expressions during play time to signal they’ve got good intentions and aren’t going to hurt each other.
From there, the coders and mathematicians on the team created an algorithm to record and sort the facial expressions the cafe cats used, employing CatFACS (Cat Facial Action Coding System) to associate each expression with its meaning.
The problem is, we humans are terrible at reading them. Even veterinarians trained in CatFACS still struggle to get it right, but happily this is precisely the sort of task algorithmic AI excels at. Like facial recognition software, a well-trained machine learning algorithm can recognize faces and record them more accurately and much faster than any person could.
In a column praising the facial expressions study, evolutionary biologist and Jane Goodall Foundation ethics board member Mark Bekoff said it’s the kind of labor-intensive work that truly advances our understanding of the ways animals communicate.
For cats and their human caretakers, Bekoff notes, it could help us reduce inter-species misunderstandings and make it easier to read our cat’s emotions, so we know when they’re not feeling well or need something.
“There are no substitutes for doing what’s needed to learn about the nitty-gritty details of how animals communicate with one another in different contexts,” Bekoff wrote. “This study of play opens the door for more widespread comparative research focusing on how animals talk to one another.”
“Do I look happy, human?” Credit: Milan Nykodym/Wikimedia Commons
We also know adult cats very rarely meow to each other, and the meow is reserved for cat-to-human communication. Imagine the frustration our little friends must feel when they have so much to tell us, but the only thing we understand are vocalizations — meows, chirps and trills — that can convey only basic ideas at best.
Scottish Folds are cute, but the genetic mutation responsible for their folded ears also causes lifelong pain, joint problems and misshapen bones.
In 1961, a shepherd named William Ross found a barn cat with a curious feature: instead of the upright, swiveling, satellite dish ears of a normal feline, this cat’s ears were floppy and shapeless, resting atop her head like a tiny knitted cap.
Ross took the cat home and named her Susie. Susie gave birth to a litter of kittens with the same floppy ears, and it all gets a bit murky from there, with a dozen variations of the story online claiming it was Ross himself or a neighbor who “created” the breed.
Regardless of who it was, the floppy ears were transformed from an abnormal feature into the unmistakable characteristic of a breed, and the Scottish Fold was born.
The cute cats quickly caught on and were officially recognized in competitions by 1971.
Now they’re more in vogue than ever. They’re the preferred pets of music superstars Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, who regularly feature photos and videos of their Scottish Folds in social media posts. People across the world are buying them, and they routinely appear in “best breed” lists online, lauded for being cuddly and docile in addition to adorable.
Ed Sheeran with his Scottish Fold cat. Credit: Ed Sheeran/Instagram
But they’ve also been banned by the same cat fancy groups that initially welcomed them, they’re prohibited outright in some countries, and animal welfare groups are begging people to stop emulating celebrities by buying them.
That’s because the same deformity that gives Scottish Folds their distinctive ears is also responsible for weak and brittle cartilage and bones elsewhere in the body, which results in lifelong pain and disability.
“The disease is evident on x-rays of cats from as young as seven weeks of age. Serious abnormalities in joints and bone growth lead to arthritis (painful, swollen joints), short, abnormally thick, and inflexible tails, spinal abnormalities and short, stiff legs. The welfare impacts of Scottish Fold Osteochondrodysplasia can be severe in terms of pain and inability to perform natural behaviours, as these cats can be lame, walk with an abnormal gait, can be reluctant to engage in normal movements such as walking or jumping, and can even become completely crippled.
There is no cure for this progressive condition.”
Sadly, the deformities and resulting pain may be the reason Scottish Folds are considered docile and cuddly: they may simply be in too much pain to move or protest when their humans hug them or pick them up.
Ross and Turner didn’t know it in 1961, but the folded ears and brittle cartilage were the result of a genetic mutation. It wasn’t until 2016 that a group of American and Australian scientists found a mutation in a single gene, TRPV4, was responsible for weak cartilage and bones, leading to the deformities highlighted by the RSPCA in the passage above, as well as “progressive joint destruction.” The condition is called osteochondrodysplasia.
Swift’s cats have appeared in her music videos, feature prominently in her online posts, and were photographed in her arms for her 2024 post announcing she was supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s presidential election.
Cats Protection, a UK charity, raised the issue in 2024, warning that Scottish Folds were becoming even more popular, with breeders struggling to meet high demand. The group issued a public statement asking cat lovers and Swift fans to avoid buying Scottish Folds. Scottish Folds are equally popular in the US, spurring resistance from stateside animal welfare groups as well.
The Governing Council of Cat Fancy, which registers breeds in the UK — and no longer recognizes Scottish Folds — was even more direct.
“We strongly advise members of the public not to try to acquire cats of this breed,” Steve Crow, chairman of Cat Fancy’s governing board, told The Guardian.
Cats aren’t equipped to use human language and there’s nothing wrong with that. Our feline friends already go to great lengths to communicate in ways we can comprehend. The least we can do is meet them halfway.
I would love it if my cat could talk to me.
Sure, he never shuts up, but if he could speak English I’d know why he meows at the same spot at the same time every morning, or what he wants on the occasions when he’s still meowing insistently at me despite the fact that his bowls are full, his box is clean, he’s had his play time, and every possible need and want of his — that I can fathom — has been met.
Most of all, I’d really like to know he understands I’ll be back soon when I go away for a few days, and my (mostly ignored) pleas for him not to attack his long-suffering, way-too-kind sitter.
Alas, Bud cannot speak. No non-human animal has ever demonstrated even basic proficiency in human language. People will point to examples like Koko the Gorilla and Nim Chimpsky, but there’s a reason why funding dried up for that kind of experiment.
It doesn’t work. It never did.
The scientists who end up taking on dual roles as researchers and parents to the animals invariably serve as interpreters, get too close to their subjects and swear that a gorilla pounding shiny buttons for “food tree food submarine” means the ape wants to have a picnic next to the ocean, or “car fly house car star” means she wants to ride a Tesla Roadster to Mars and start a colony with Elon Musk.
Koko, Nim, Chantek and the other apes who were the subjects of decades-long attempts to humanize them — and teach them language in the process — were ultimately not much different than Clever Hans the horse, who was reading subconscious nonverbal cues from his owner and convinced tens of thousands of people that he could do math and understand spoken language.
Hans had scores of experts fooled until the German psychologist Oskar Pfungst figured out how the horse was coming up with the correct answers.
Regardless of which famous example we’re talking about, no animal has ever mastered syntax, and the best that could be said of their proficiency with language, or lack of it, is that they learned they’d get attention and food when they pounded on a talking board or approximated a word in sign language.
Even if non-human primates were able to learn a handful of words by frequently reinforced association with an object, there has never been any evidence that they are actually using the words as language rather than simply understanding “Pushing the button that makes this sound means I get a treat!” (And yes, there is a profound difference. The former reveals the presence of cognitive processes while the latter is a conditioned response.)
Despite decades of intense effort, no animal has ever demonstrated the ability to use human language. At best an animal bangs on a few buttons and people are left to speculate on the intent. Maybe Fluffy likes the way a certain word sounds. Maybe it’s just fun to hammer on buttons the way it’s fun to pop bubble wrap. Most likely, these cats and dogs know that using a talking board is a guaranteed way to get attention, a treat and a head scratch from their caretakers.
Influencers and their talking boards
TikTok, which spawns inane trends with the reliability of an atomic clock, has provided a platform for people who insist their cats and dogs can talk. Using “talking boards” — elaborate set-ups in which words are assigned to their own buttons — they “teach” their cats how to express themselves in English and provide proof in the form of heavily edited, out-of-context clips that require the same sort of creative interpretation pioneered by Penny Patterson, Koko’s caretaker.
Seriously?
I just watched a video in which a woman claims her cat, named after Justin Bieber, was describing an encounter with a coyote by stomping on buttons for “stranger,” “Justin,” “Mike,” and “stranger.”
The woman says she thought Justin was asleep at the time, but now she believes the orange tabby saw the coyote outside and was still stressing about it well into the next day.
While she’s repeating Justin’s “words” back to him, two of her other cats come by and step all over the talking board. I guess whatever they had to say wasn’t important.
Justin’s talking board has 42 buttons, which stresses credulity well beyond the breaking point. More than half of the buttons are used for abstract concepts.
But forget all that for a moment and ask yourself how our own efforts to decode the meow have been going.
Despite our status as intelligent, sapient animals, despite the powerful AI algorithms at our disposal, despite the benefit of being able to digitally record and analyze every utterance, we haven’t come close to a reliable method for interpreting feline vocalizations.
Likewise with dolphins, whale song, corvid calls and the sounds made by other animals at the top of the cognition pyramid.
Mostly, we’re learning we’ve underestimated the complexity of our non-human companions’ inner lives, especially when it comes to the kind of multi-modal communication humans also engage in, but only subconsciously. We say what we want with our mouths, while our eyes, facial expressions and body language say what we’re actually thinking.
Likewise, the meow is an unnatural way for cats to communicate, and it contains only a fraction of the information cats are putting out there. It’s just that we can’t reliably read feline facial expressions, let alone tail, whisker and posture. (Studies have shown most of us, even when we live with cats, don’t get measurably better at this. In fact, we’re often no better than people with limited feline experience, but we think we’re better.)
Putting the burden on our furry friends
If we can’t crack a simple and limited system of vocalizations, aren’t we putting unrealistic expectations on cats? The average person has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, yet somehow we expect cats can latch on to an arbitrary number of them, approximate mastery of syntax that has eluded even our closest cousins, and bridge a cognition gap we haven’t been able to bridge ourselves.
It’s all too much.
I’ve had Buddy since he was eight or nine weeks old, and in more than nine years I still don’t know why he makes this praying motion. We may be best buds, but some things just don’t translate.
There’s a simple truth at the heart of this: Cats did not evolve to speak or parse human language, and that’s perfectly fine.
The little ones already meet us more than halfway because they understand we are hopelessly incompetent at reading tail, whisker or body language, and they understand we communicate with vocalizations.
By forgoing their natural methods of communication in favor of ours, cats are already taking on most of the burden in interspecies communication. Asking them to do more than that, to learn many dozens of words and the rudimentary rules of language, seems like laziness, wishful thinking or insanity on our part. Pretending that certain cats are successful is an exercise in the same kind of cynical opportunism that fuels every other desperate attempt by people trying to turn their pets into influencers. People do it because the reward is money and attention.
Worse, it contributes to the spread of misinformation. TikTok’s talking board videos routinely net millions of views, converting a credulous audience into an army of true believers who are convinced that, with just a little effort, their feline pal can shoot the shit with them.
If people want to construct elaborate talking boards in their homes and pretend their cats are expressing themselves in English, who am I to object? It’s not the smartest use of time, but have at it. What I won’t do is participate in the delusion that felines are a few buttons away from being able conversation partners, nor will I pretend these efforts have any relationship to science.
So to the journalists who keep writing credulous stories about these supposedly talking animals: please familiarize yourself with the example of Clever Hans, and please, I beg you to stop promoting these videos as if they’re anything more than wishful thinking. You are doing your readers a disservice for the sake of a few clicks.
Note: Jackson Galaxy isn’t a fan either, saying he’s “got some serious problems” with the talking board trend. Calling it “problematic,” he points out that cats are not only partially domesticated and the only animal species in history to take that step without human prompting, but humans have never selectively bred cats for specific behaviors or to bring out intelligence traits as we have with canines. (Think of sheep dogs or retrievers, who are the products of thousands of years of breeding for well-defined tasks.) There simply hasn’t been a need to breed cats for behavioral traits since the thing humans traditionally valued most about them — their ability to reliably eradicate rodents and protect human foodstuffs — is innate. No one had to teach cats how to hunt or breed them for the task. It’s only in the last two hundred years or so that certain human societies began breeding cats, and they did so for aesthetic attributes like coat patterns. Galaxy also notes that animals do not express emotions the same way humans do. Like monkeys, who “smile” when they’re terrified, felines express joy, anger and fear with their tails, whiskers, ears and body language. It’s not in their nature to tell us they’re happy or scared by padding up to a contraption and hammering on a button.
Top image of “Justin Bieber” the cat credit Sarah Baker.
Pain In The Bud 