With their otter-like features, their squeaky vocalizations and their mastery of multiple environments, jaguarundis are unique in the world of cats.
Jaguarundi
Taxonomic name:Herpailurus yagouaroundi Genus: Felis (small cats) Size: Males weigh up to 20 lbs, with typical sexual dimorphism for felid species Lifespan: Up to 20 years in captivity Gestation: 75 days Litter size: Between one and four kittens per litter Distribution: Almost the entirety of South America as well as the southern US IUCN Red List status: Least concern, but threatened by habitat loss
If you spot a jaguarundi in the wild, there’s a good chance you won’t know what you’re looking at.
Their sleek, elongated bodies are almost weaselesque when seen from the side, an impression made stronger by the way their heads are shaped in profile. From some angles they can strongly resemble otters, an likeness strengthened by their short, dusky coats.
But seen head-on they’re definitely cats, and even though they’re small felines — about one and a half to two times the size of domestic kitties — their facial features can be reminiscent of big cats, especially their broader noses, rounded ears and the set of their eyes.
Seen from an angle like this, jaguarundis resemble jaguar cubs:
Indeed, jaguarundi means “dark jaguar” in Old Guarani, an extinct predecessor of the Tupi family of indigenous languages that were spoken in South America for thousands of years before the arrival of the conquistadors and the Spanish language. Modern variants of the language still exist in countries like Paraguay, which may account for the enduring names of several species of western hemisphere cats. (Jaguar itself is based on the indigenous Tupi word “yguara,” and pumas have dozens of surviving names with indigenous roots to go along with their many names in English.)
As New World cats, jaguarundis boast an impressive range that stretches from southern Argentina through Latin America and into the lower US states.
Like their larger cousins, the jaguars, jaguarundis are comfortable in the water and are strong swimmers. They’re also adept hunters on land, excellent climbers, and they’re impressively sure-footed while traversing branches high above ground level.
In short, the adaptable felines can just about do it all.
Note the otter-like appearance of the jaguarundi head in side profile.
In the wild, jaguarundis have been known to hunt prey as large as small deer and help themselves to seafood snacks when the mood strikes them, but analyses of their diets shows they have a strong preference for mammals, particularly a variety of wild rodents found in dense jungles and forests.
Jaguarundis don’t just look different compared to other cats — they sound different as well.
Conservationists call the jaguarundi’s vocalizations “whistles” and “chirps,” but to us they sound more like squeaks.
Take a listen for yourself:
It’s illegal under the Big Cat Public Safety Act to keep jaguarundis as pets, and the jaguarundi curl, a breed meant to mimic the appearance of the jaguarundi, is not related to the wild cat.
While they’re known to range in Texas and Arizona, sightings of jaguarundis are rare. From a distance their movement looks almost indistinguishable from those of house cats, and they’re famously elusive — by the time most people do a double take, the shy felines have disappeared into tall grass, brush or jungle.
Convinced that culling cats will prevent local wildlife from going extinct, despite no evidence supporting that idea, New Zealand’s authorities have pledged to wipe out ferals and strays.
A recent RNZ story about efforts to exterminate cats in New Zealand starts with an anecdote about a man named Victor Tinndale, describing the way he bludgeons a cat to death as casually as if he’s sipping a cup of coffee.
Tinndale has taken it upon himself to kill cats even though the country’s wildlife management authorities told him not to. Why? Because he thinks cats are responsible for driving native species toward extinction.
He doesn’t know that, of course. No one does. No one’s bothered to do the research, and the driving force behind the claim that cats are responsible is a series of meta-analyses by birders who literally invented numbers to align with their predetermined conclusions about predatory impact.
To date there is not a single study that accurately measures feline predatory impact, nor is there a shred of evidence that slaughtering cats — whether beating them to death, shooting them with shotguns or poisoning them — has any beneficial impact on endangered bird species.
Yet there are vigilantes aplenty slaughtering cats across New Zealand, youth hunting contests encouraging kids to shoot cats and kittens, and government-sponsored extermination programs, like a particularly ghastly effort on a small island off New Zealand’s coast, where members of a team tell themselves they’re doing good work by sniping animals who are doing what they were born to do.
Ferals and strays already have tough lives without being hunted for sport or at the behest of government officials who aren’t in full possession of the facts. Credit: Mohan Rai/Pexels
The RNZ story describes Tinndale merrily skipping through the Aotearoan wilderness, singing songs and cracking jokes like a perverse Tom Bombadil as he murders cats unfortunate enough to get caught in his traps.
RNZ cameras follow Tinndale as he finds a terrified feline in one of the his traps. Tinndale describes the cat’s impending death at his hands as some sort of inevitable cosmic justice. He didn’t sentence the cat to die, he argues. He’s just the man who carries out the sentence.
“This cat is just an utter killing machine,” Tinndale says, addressing a camera as he repeats rhetoric from birder Peter Marra — who has advocated for the destruction of the entire species — almost word for word. “I’d hate to think what this cat has slayed to survive. So this guy has got to go, you know?”
The next scene shows Tinndale walking along the shore, the cat now hanging dead in his hands. He is judge, jury and executioner.
Tinndale buries his victims in a “graveyard” he made near a hut, admitting the graveyard is a “little bit of a laugh.” Tinndale was shocked, the story says, when New Zealand’s Department of Conservation didn’t pat him on the head for his vigilante efforts.
“I thought they’d have a chuckle, you know, and be pleased, but it was nothing of the sort,” he told RNZ.
Thought they’d have a chuckle?
This man thinks bludgeoning animals to death is hilarious. He is a psychotic vigilante who has taken it upon himself to violently end life. Why is he allowed to own weapons? Why is he not in prison or on a court-mandated mental illness management program?
Brad Windust with a trophy hunter’s expression as he shows off a Maine Coon mix he killed with the help of his hunting dog. Credit: Supplied to NRZ
The story goes on to quote Jessi Morgan of the Predator Free New Zealand Trust, who flat-out admits she can’t say how many cats there are in the country, let alone measure their predatory impact.
“I’ve seen estimates from two-and-a-half million to 14 million, which basically tells us we’ve got no idea what those numbers are,” Morgan said before immediately relaying anecdotes from hunters and farmers who say they’re “seeing more.”
This is not how we make decisions between life and death! This is not science, not by any definition of the word. This is not public policy. This is vigilantism and a mob mentality, amplified by the fact that it’s easier to blame a defenseless species for our own conservation failures and humanity’s impact on wildlife.
It is gross, utter disrespect for life under the guise of conservation, by people who not only can’t articulate what sort of damage they think felines are doing to their country, but have not a scrap of evidence that vigilantes running around bludgeoning cats to death are doing anything other than causing needless suffering.
Worse, it’s clear at least some of these self-appointed nature guardians are enjoying the task of murdering cats. It’s evident in their smiles as they show off their prizes and in the way they talk about their “work” — not as a solemn duty after all other options have been exhausted, but as something to “have a chuckle” over.
Credit: Dianne Concha/Pexels
This is also a failure of journalism, a failure to follow the most basic best practices and rules, to ask for proof when people assert opinions and call them facts. Those who call themselves journalists, who credulously spread the bunk studies about feline impact on native species, should be ashamed of themselves for not even taking a few minutes to read the studies they cite. Anyone who reads the research would immediately understand that the “studies” — which are really meta-analyses of old data — don’t provide any proof that cats are responsible for pushing endangered species toward extinction. They do nothing of the sort.
What we do know, and have confirmed over more than half a century of rigorous science, is that we are responsible for wiping out wildlife — more than 73 percent of the world’s monitored wildlife populations in the past 50 years alone, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s annual report.
Aside from the fact that they don’t have homes, these cats are no different than pet felines. They are the same species. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Animal welfare groups have never disputed the idea that cats probably do have a part in endangering small mammals and bird species. They are predators. Hunting is their role.
But that is a far cry from proving they have a measurable impact, let alone are the primary drivers. In rare cases when research teams did the hard work of taking a feline census, as Washington, D.C.’s Cat Count did, the population numbers turn out to be considerably lower than expected.
Data from the Cat Count also confirmed what we know, that cats do not stray more than a few hundred feet from their territory, whether it’s a human home or a small shelter in a managed colony. In urban and suburban environments, the study found, cats have minimal impact through hunting unless they’re living directly adjacent to wooded areas.
Sending a bunch of lunatics out, dancing and skipping as they arbitrarily slaughter sentient creatures with real emotions, is the kind of monstrous behavior only humans are capable of.
Human-made devices and structures kill innumerable birds annually, a fact that isn’t accounted for in studies and news stories blaming cats for bird species extinctions. Credit: Amol Mande/Pexels
But it isn’t enough for New Zealand’s government to have vigilantes killing cats, or community-sponsored cat hunts. Now the government has pledged to eradicate feral cats by 2050. Because feral cats are the same species as stray and pet cats, and there is no way to determine by sight if a cat is feral or just frightened, that means any feline found outdoors will be killed.
“In order to boost biodiversity, to boost heritage landscape and to boost the type of place we want to see, we’ve got to get rid of some of these killers,” says Tama Potaka, the country’s conservation minister.
Note the language in the linked story, which describes domestic cats as if they’re a separate species. That’s the kind of ignorance that drives these cruel efforts.
New Zealand is heavily reliant on tourism, with visitors accounting for almost six percent of the country’s GDP before COVID-19, a number the country’s leaders expect to match in late 2025 as the tourism industry recovers. It’s part of New Zealand’s overall shift to services instead of products in an effort to diversify its economy.
Anyone who loves cats, who thinks men shouldn’t play God, who thinks we ought to demand at least something in the form of proof before allowing socially maladjusted vigilantes to brutally kill animals, should boycott New Zealand as a travel destination.
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Header image: Tinndale walking with a cat he killed via RNZ
Jaguars, pumas, ocelots and margays are able to thrive in the same jungles, a unique arrangement that sheds light on how each species lives.
The jungles of Guatemala are teeming with life.
The guttural calls of howler monkeys haunt the rainforest from above, where scarlet macaws hop branches in flashes of red, yellow and blue.
On the forest floor opossums, peccaries, and oversize rodents called pacas move through dense brush, occasionally picked out by the few shafts of light able to break through the canopy. Ocellated turkeys plumed in iridescent copper and emerald advertise themselves to potential mates with thumping sounds, while spider monkeys perch on the weathered stones of long-forgotten Mayan cities that were swallowed by the jungle centuries ago.
As in most tropics, the apex predators are cats — four different species, to be exact. Jaguars sit at the top, unchallenged. Pumas, close in size if not ferocity, also find sustenance in the rainforest alongside ocelots and margays.
Margays are smaller than house cats and resemble tiny ocelots. They’re outstanding climbers, expert hunters, and spend most of their time in trees. Unlike most cat species, which are crepuscular, margays are nocturnal. Credit: Clement Bardot/Wikimedia Commons
How do four medium carnivorous species exist side by side?
By dividing time, space and items on the menu, according to a new study.
Ocelots are extremely adaptable: they’re excellent climbers and swimmers, and can thrive in various environments. Credit: Victor Landaeta/Pexels
The felids hunt at different levels of the jungle at different times of day, and while there’s overlap between prey, each species has its own distinct diet, according to a research team from Oregon State University. Their paper, Niche partitioning among neotropical felids, was published earlier this month in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
As the big kids on the block, jaguars primarily eat peccaries (pig-like ungulates that weigh up to 88 pounds), armadillos, deer and, sadly, ocelots. Apparently membership in Club Felid does not grant the smaller wildcats a pass. Ocelots top out at about 35 pounds, while the largest jaguars weigh in at about 350 pounds, making the smaller cats easy prey.
Pumas opportunistically prey on peccaries and brocket deer, but the majority of their diet is composed of monkeys, both spider and howler. Ocelots and margays naturally go for smaller prey, sticking mostly to rodents and opossums.
As the largest and most powerful cats in the western hemisphere, jaguars are the apex predators of their environment. Credit: Atlantic Ambience/Pexels
While jaguars hunt on the ground and have a well-documented habit of slipping into the water to prey on caiman and crocodiles, pumas, ocelots and margays take advantage of their climbing abilities and lighter frames to reach arboreal prey. That allows pumas, for example, to snag monkeys and arboreal opossum species from the canopy, so they don’t have to compete with jaguars.
The team verified the “spatial, temporal, and dietary niche partitioning” within the Maya Biosphere Reserve by using ground camera traps, arboreal camera traps and fecal samples, which allowed them to confirm the prey each species has been consuming.
Interestingly, margays are the pickiest — or perhaps most limited — of the bunch, preying on only seven species, while the other three cats regularly hunt between 20 and 27 different kinds of animals.
The information gleaned from the study not only helps researchers understand how these species interact with their environment, but also can help guide conservation decisions to safeguard them against extinction.
Pumas, also known as cougars and mountain lions, are adaptable and elusive. Credit: Catherine Harding Wiltshire/Pexels
Ocelots, one of the western hemisphere’s most adaptable cat species, are often mistaken for young jaguars.
In 1999 biologists from the Dallas Zoo were lending a hand on a project to monitor and protect America’s ocelots, who primarily range in southern Texas.
With limited resources, the team was trying to keep the wild cats in a protected area and get them to use paths where camera traps had been installed. One tried and true method was to use scents, but what could attract ocelots?
“Sort of on a lark, one of our research assistants produced a bottle of Obsession,” Dallas Zoo’s Cynthia Bennett said at the time.
The felines loved it. Members of the research team watched astounded as the scent magically transformed previously ignored objects into items of sudden fascination.
The cats happily rubbed their cheeks and bodies against anything sprayed with the stuff.
“It´s a little embarrassing to watch, actually,” Bennett said. “It does make you wonder what´s in the perfume.”
(It’s probably civetone, a synthetic version of a pheromone produced by civets used as a binder in the Calvin Klein scent.)
Credit: Victor Landaeta/Pexels
In addition to their predilection for cologne, ocelots are known for enjoying water, hunting by twilight, and napping in trees. The medium-size felids, who weigh up to 40 pounds in the wild, are also easily recognizable by their big eyes, the dark rings that surround them, and the way those markings become twin stripes that sweep over their foreheads.
Perhaps most striking are their large, wavy rosettes, which sometimes get them confused for young jaguars. In several indigenous South American languages, ocelots and jaguars share a name or have very similar names.
An ocelot kitten. After a gestation period of about three months, ocelot moms give birth to as many as three kittens. Credit: Wikimedia CommonsAn ocelot resting in a tree. Like other leopardus species, ocelots are proficient climbers. Credit: Wikipedia Commons
Ocelots have another quality that may lead people to confuse them with jaguars: they’re fond of water and they’re considered strong swimmers. That allows them to master their habitats, which often include rivers winding through rainforests and mangrove swamps.
The resourceful cats are adept predators on land and they can also pluck fish out of rivers.
An ocelot going for a dip. Credit: yellowlime_des/Reddit
Ocelots are categorized as a species of “least concern” by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) but that doesn’t mean they’re thriving. Like pumas, the species is adaptable and can survive in varied surroundings. Still, ocelots contend with the same pressures other species experience, including habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting and poaching.
And while they can’t get enough of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, maybe that’s a good thing.
According to zookeepers and wild cat experts, ocelots have a uniquely funky body odor which is amplified by their prodigious scent-marking. They want everyone to know where their territory is.
For zookeepers, the cats’ Obsession obsession could pull double duty as olfactory enrichment in their habitat — and a way to mitigate the stink.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Name: Ocelot (leopardus pardalis) Weight: Up to 40 pounds, with limited sexual dimorphism (males are slightly larger) Lifespan: Up to 20 years in captivity Activity: Crepscular, nocturnal Habitat: Claims territory in places where prey, water and dense ground cover are plentiful but the species is adaptable and survives in varied biomes
The Asian golden cat, also known as catopuma, is an elusive medium-size wildcat with striking features and exceptional hunting abilities.
It’s extraordinarily elusive, moves with a grace superlative even among fellow felids, and enjoys mythical status in many of Asia’s cultures.
It is the Asian golden cat, a medium-size feline that calls a diverse range of places home, from the mountains of rural China to the jungles of Sumatra.
Known officially as Catopuma temminckii, the species is about three times the size of domestic cats but extremely adept at taking down much larger prey, including young water buffalo and other ungulates several times the cat’s body weight.
An Asian golden cat. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Asian golden cats inspire legends in many Asian cultures in part because of how difficult they are to find. Even the appearance of one on a trail camera in Thailand’s Khao Luang National Park this summer spawned news headlines, so rarely are they seen.
Often, as was the case with the recent sighting, they’re fleeting, just glimpses before the animals melt back into the jungle. The fire tiger seen in the June 20 trail camera footage pads across a clearing, clearly unhurried, before disappearing back into the ground cover.
In some places it’s good luck to catch a glimpse, while in other locales — like parts of Thailand — people believe a single strand of Catopuma fur is enough to protect the bearer from their larger cousins, panthera tigris. (I wouldn’t rely on that personally, but it does show how large tigers loom in the imagination in areas where they still roam the wild, even as low as their numbers are these days.)
While the Asian golden cat is known as the fire tiger in some places, it’s not a close relative of true tigers, at least not in terms of the cat family.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Catopuma is a feline, meaning it can meow and purr, but cannot roar. That puts the species closer genetically to domestic cats, pumas, ocelots, servals and other members of the feline subfamily. True big cats — tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards — are part of the pantherinae subfamily. Aside from their size, they are distinguished by their ability to roar, but they cannot purr or meow.
The Asian golden cat is a feline, but shares some physiological features with big cats
Even though catopuma is genetically closer to small- and medium-size felines, its gait, substantial tail and head shape are reminiscent of big cat features.
The ferocious medium-size cats also have a melanistic color morph that makes them look like smaller versions of jaguars and leopards.
A melanistic catopuma seen on a trail camera. Credit: Panthera
The fire tiger is classified as threatened as its habitats are destroyed to make way for more palm oil plantations, among other agricultural and industrial facilities.
Pain In The Bud 