The huge Bengal may be the biggest tiger in India, and has already become a draw for tourists visiting from other parts of the country.
Hercules looks like a heavyweight boxer reincarnated as a tiger.
The massive apex predator was virtually unknown outside of India’s Kumaon district until this week, when a tourist posted a short video of the nearly 700-pound animal lumbering out of the brush and into clear view as he crossed a dirt path between rural villages.
The Bengal, who may be the biggest cat in India, is majestic. His gait is leisurely, as if he knows that anyone or anything he may encounter will clear a path the moment they see him. His fur doesn’t hide the rippling muscle underneath, and as he spots a group of tourists with cameras aimed at him, he bares his teeth momentarily, then pretends as if they don’t exist as he takes his sweet time crossing the path.
“In my entire career, I have never seen such a giant tiger,” Prakesh Arya, a divisional forest officer, told the New Indian Express.
For conservationists, tourists and the government of India, whose national animal is the Bengal, Hercules’ existence is proof that Project Tiger is on the right track. The project is a national effort to save the iconic species, grow its population, and protect it from poachers.
Hercules’ territory includes Ramnagar, a town in northern India known as they gateway to Jim Corbett National Park. The preserve is named after the renowned tiger hunter who took down the Demon of Champawat, a tigress who had killed at least 435 people during a decade-long rein of terror.
Corbett, who described tigers as “large-hearted gentlemen” who were unfairly maligned, was known for his prowess in hunting down man-eating tigers and leopards, but later in life he turned to conservation, realizing that Earth’s biggest cats were in danger of extinction if drastic efforts weren’t taken to save them. That was a century ago.
Now India devotes significant resources to their protection and well-being, with an entire corps of dedicated professional rangers and anti-poaching teams tracking the animals and constantly patrolling the vast country’s 58 tiger preserves, which cover 82,836.44 square kilometers.
A large tiger cools off in water on a hot day. Credit: Warren Garst/Wikimedia Commons, Colorado State University Library
For tigers like Hercules, having large contiguous ranges gives them the chance to live the way nature intended. Experts say the abundance of prey in the reserves, especially in the region Hercules calls home, has resulted in larger, more robust cats of the type that were once a memory.
“This is a clear symbol of the rich biodiversity and the success of our management efforts in this forest area,” Arya said.
In turn, the presence of the iconic cats has revitalized tourism. Tourists who have seen Hercules described the experience as “overwhelming.”
“Seeing ‘Hercules’ was an unforgettable experience,” Priya Sharma, a tourist from Delhi, told the Express.
Buddy’s back at it, trying to befriend big cats. Emboldened by his success with the tolerant and wise jaguars, the reckless tabby has his sights set on the savanna and its temperamental predators, the leopards. Can Buddy win the admiration of these notoriously dangerous felids, or will he end up as a light snack for a spotted cat?
VIRUNGA NATIONAL PARK, Democratic Republic of Congo — “What the heck is that?”
A leopardess raised her head in response to her mate’s question, gazing down from the sturdy limb of an acacia tree where she’d taken refuge from the scorching midday sun.
Two hundred yards ahead, a tiny gray cat was padding toward them, picking his way carefully around rocks and occasionally disappearing in the high grass.
“There’s nothin’ that a hundred men on Mars could ever do,” the little feline sang as he walked. “I bless the rains down in Africa! I bless the rains down in…”
The diminutive feline stopped near the base of the tree and looked up at the leopards.
The adult leopards were momentarily stunned until one of the cubs awoke from her nap, spotted Buddy and exclaimed: “Look, mommy, lunch!”
The small cat flashed a wide smile.
“That’s a great idea! I’ve already eaten, but you know what they say: a lunch a day barely keeps the rumbles at bay! I’m a three-lunch cat, myself. So what are we having?”
Another cub piped up.
“That’s not lunch, that’s a snack!” he told his sister.
“And what a cute little snack he is!” the female cub said, gracefully dropping from her napping spot in the tree.
Buddy’s eyes bulged.
“You’re…you’re talking about me?”
The male cub did a squeaky impression of a roar.
“Do you see any other single-serve snacks around?”
Buddy licked his lips, his effort to hide his fear betrayed by his rising hackles and tail, which now resembled a quivering spiked club.
“I…I…I am a cat,” he said in his best impression of an authoritative meow. “I’m practically your cousin!”
The female was just paces away now and moving too fast for Buddy’s liking as he backpedaled.
“The question is,” she said, “are you tasty like cousin Serval or cousin cheetah?”
Credit: RudiHulshof/iStock
Buddy changed tactics.
“This is an outrage! Not even the tigers tried to eat me! This is…this is, uh, catibalism!”
The cubs were circling him now.
“Mommy, can we have a snack?” the male cub called, looking back at his mother on the tree.
“As long as it doesn’t spoil your dinner later,” came the reply.
“It won’t, mamma!”
Buddy gulped.
The cubs closed the distance, ready to strike, and Buddy was babbling while pleading for his life when the earth itself shook.
Branches jolted and leaves dropped. A flock of birds nesting in a nearby tree took off, silhouettes etching ephemeral geometric patterns in the sky. In the distance, a baboon shrieked a warning to its troop.
The cubs went from aggressive to retreat in the span of an instant, and even their parents looked alarmed, taking off after their young.
Buddy watched them flee, wondering if he should bolt in another direction as something incomprehensibly gargantuan lumbered toward him, shaking the trees.
He’d emptied his bowels by the time a gigantic head poked through the foliage, followed by the rest of the colossal beast. It was gray-skinned, leathery and bizarre, unlike anything Buddy had ever seen.
“Giant space aliens!” he screamed, turning around and running right into a tree trunk.
“Ahhhhh! Don’t eat me!”
Buddy awoke in a sweat, his fur damp in the soupy, stifling heat.
An entire platoon of the peculiar beasts stood around him, their sizes ranging from 25 Buddies in mass to freakishly large individuals sporting pairs of prodigious teeth that looked like scimitars made of bone.
“Einstein’s awake,” one of them rumbled, and the rest turned from stuffing themselves with leaves to get a better look at the Liliputian animal before them.
“What is that thing?” one of them asked.
“It’s a fun-size cheetah!” one exclaimed confidently.
“No, it’s a baby Serval!” another said. “But the color’s all wrong.”
In the distance, a giraffe poked its head above the tree line, pausing to munch on the silky pink flowers of a mimosa tree.
Buddy was saved from hungry leopards by friendly giant space aliens!
Buddy cautiously pushed himself up on his paws. These aliens did not seem interested in eating him.
“Greetings,” he said. “I am a feline, a cat from planet Earth! What planet do you come from?”
There was a pause, then trumpeting, cacaphonic laughter.
“‘What planet are you from?'” one of the great beasts mimicked, sparking a second round of giggles that sounded like the trombone section of an orchestra, if someone had slipped the players psychedelics.
“We are elephants, and this is our home,” said the leader, a magnificent female. “And you, little one, are fortunate we happened by.”
Buddy puffed himself up.
“I think you mean the leopards were lucky,” he said, flexing his meowscles. “They didn’t want to tangle with these guns.”
The elephants chortled. “Can we keep him? He’s funny!”
The matriarch shook her massive head.
“He is far from home, and he should return before he runs into leopards again, or something worse,” she said.
Buddy looked unsure of himself.
“But I’m homies with the jaguars and the tigers! I thought…you know, I could be down with the leopards too. Us big cats gotta stick together, ya know? It’s hard out there for an apex predator. By the way, got any lunch?”
One of the elephants raised her trunk, pointing east toward a herd of intimidating horned beasts.
“Lunch,” she said. “Think you can take them?”
Buddy gulped.
“Go home, little one.”
Buddy’s version of events!
“So anyway,” Buddy said, addressing his human, “that’s how I impressed the leopards, and they made me their king. In fact, they bestowed the honorific ‘Paka mkubwa na mwenye misuli hodari,’ which means ‘great and mighty muscled cat’ in Swahili!”
“Sounds like you had quite an adventure! That’s impressive, Bud!” Big Buddy said.
“It is! It is!” Buddy said, nodding vigorously.
Big Buddy made a whistling sound.
“Was that before or after you peed yourself in terror?”
“What? I…no, I told you, they made me their king! Where did you hear this, this slander?”
Big Buddy reached for his iPad, pulling up images of a terrified Little Buddy running from leopard cubs on the savanna, Buddy running head-first into a tree, and Buddy cowering before a herd of elephants.
“A wildlife tour was nearby during your ‘coronation,’ but this is probably just a gray tabby who looks exactly like you and happened to be right where you were crowned,” he said. “Congratulations, Your Meowjesty!”
A comedy, a remarkable documentary, a classic and a surprise hit make the list for the best cat-centric movies.
Keanu (2016): Jordan Peele stars as Rell, a man who is despondent after he’s dumped by his girlfriend. When a kitten shows up on his front step, Rell takes the little guy in and his life is suddenly transformed. He’s enamored with the kitten, whom he names Keanu, can’t stop talking about him, and even begins photographing him in dioramas based on famous films.
But tragedy strikes when drug dealers ransack Rell’s home, mistaking it for the small-time drug dealer’s home next door, and take Keanu. Rell and his cousin, Clarence (Keegan Michael-Key) embark on a quest to get Keanu back no matter what it takes, even if it means posing as a pair of contract killers to infiltrate the criminal world where Keanu’s been taken. It’s every bit as absurd as you’d imagine — but it’s also very, very funny. “Actually, we’re in the market right now for a gangsta pet,” is not a line I’d expect to hear in a movie, but in Keanu it works.
Flow is the surprise hit of the awards season.
Flow (2024): Even the hype of Golden Globe awards and Oscar nominations can’t take away from the powerful impression Flow makes. By now most of us are probably familiar with it through clips or trailers, but they don’t do justice to the beauty of director Gints Zilbalodis’ world, nor how naturally expressive his protagonist, Cat, is.
The animators put in an extraordinary amount of effort into understanding and perfectly replicating every feline behavioral quirk, every hackled coat and curiously bent tail. They accomplish the same with Cat’s companions, including a Labrador, a secretarybird, a lemur and a capybara. And while we’re dazzled by the visuals and energetic narrative, Zilbalodis poses a thematic question as the flood waters take the animals through the ruins of human civilization: without people, the world will go on. What would a world without humans look like? Cat and his companions tell us one story while the environment tells us another, and the result is greater than the sum of its parts.
Tiger: Spy In The Jungle
Tiger: A Spy In The Jungle (2008): What makes this documentary so special is that it was filmed over three years in an Indian tiger preserve, and the filmmakers not only disguised cameras as rocks and tree stumps, they trained elephants how to carry “trunk cams,” achieving shots which no human cameraman could ever hope to get without spooking the subjects of the film.
Tigers don’t hunt elephants because they’re simply too big. Unlike lions, they’re not feeding a whole pride, and they don’t hunt cooperatively. It’s just not worth the effort required to take down the giant, majestic beasts. As a result, tigers and elephants not only tolerate each other, they mostly ignore each other’s presence.
One of the cubs stares curiously at a camera disguised as a rock in Tiger: Spy In The Jungle
That allowed the team to get unprecedented shots of an iron-willed tigress raising a litter of four cubs by herself. We see their dens, we watch the cubs play, and we witness the incredible prowess of the mother, who according to narrator David Attenborough has a remarkable 80 percent success rate while hunting. That’s pretty much unheard of.
With four young mouths to feed in addition to herself, the tigress is determined, and also supremely skilled. The whole jungle erupts in a cacophony of shrieks and alarm calls the instant a single animal gets a whiff of the tigress’ presence, but that still doesn’t stop her from achieving her goal.
Still, the odds are against all four cubs making it, with dangers like adult leopards, sickness and hunger. Through Spy In The Jungle, we get to see the entire journey, from the newborn cubs to the confident juveniles on the cusp of adulthood. There’s no better tiger documentary anywhere.
Shere Khan, right, makes an intimidating villain in The Jungle Book (2016)
The Jungle Book (2016): With so many Disney cash-grabs in the form of live-action remakes of classics that did not need to be remade, it’s easy to dismiss The Jungle Book. The thing is, this movie has heart. Neel Sethi is an earnest Mowgli, Idris Elba voices the infamous tiger Shere Khan, and to balance out the felid villainy with some heroism, Sir Ben Kingsley voices Bagheera, the noble leopard who discovers baby Mowgli in the jungle and protects him as his wolf friends raise the boy. Lupita Nyong’o as the wolf matriarch Raksha, Bill Murray as the honey-obsessed bear Baloo and Christopher Walken as orangutan King Louie round out a great cast.
It’s easy to mistake house cats for larger wildcats when photos and videos are blurry and lack familiar items to establish a sense of scale. The same phenomenon is responsible for UFO sightings and cryptid creatures like the Loch Ness Monster.
Recently several reports have been making a big deal about blurry videos of black cats, claiming they’re “black mountain lions” or “black panthers” roaming in places like Missouri and Louisiana.
The footage of the first video was shot in Missouri, where pumas once ranged, were extirpated in the 20th century, and have returned in small numbers in recent decades. Like most photos and videos of cryptid or unidentified animals, this one is blurry, taken from a distance, and lacks any object near the animal to provide a sense of scale. The second video is simply a black house cat with her kitten in rural Louisiana.
Our brains are pattern recognition machines and when the information we’re looking for — be it spatial, detail or contextual data — isn’t present, our minds tend to fill in the gaps. That’s the reason why we see faces in clouds, creatures in shadows, men on the moon and the Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwiches. (The technical term for “perception imposing meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus” is “pareidolia,” from the Greek for “instead of” and “image.”)
Compounding the problem is the fact that the word “panther” is one of the most confusing of felid descriptors, a word that vaguely refers to physically large cats but doesn’t refer to any particular species, coat pattern or color.
Big cats can be voids too, like this stunning black jaguar in Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Above: A jaguar, a leopard, a puma (mountain lion) and a melanistic jaguar. Although jaguars and leopards look nearly identical, jaguars are stocker with thicker limbs and have blotches inside their rosettes, while leopards do not.
The word panther can refer to a puma, a jaguar or a leopard, but only the latter two species can have melanistic (black) coats.
Contrary to popular belief, even a black cat’s fur is not entirely black — you can still see the rosettes and spots of their coat patterns up close and in certain light conditions.
This jaguar’s rosettes and spots are visible in direct light. Jaguars in the wild are rarely seen so close or in “perfect” conditions, making it difficult to see coat markings of melanistic members of the species. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
However, jaguars don’t range in Missouri, leopards are not native to the Americas, and if someone indeed spotted one of the very rare pumas in Missouri, it could not be black because melanistic pumas do not exist.
Mountain lions (Puma concolor in taxonomic nomenclature) are physically large and are the second-biggest cats by size and weight in the western hemisphere after jaguars, but they are not technically “big cats” because they are not part of the pantherinae subfamily. Pumas cannot roar like big cats, but they’re capable of the classic wildcat “scream,” and they can even meow like small cats.
By process of elimination — and the cat’s physical shape — we can conclude the Missouri video shows a house cat that looks larger because there’s nothing nearby to give us a sense of scale.
This piece of a grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 on eBay in 2004 because bidders believed the Virgin Mary’s face miraculously appeared on it. Credit: eBay
It may seem unlikely that someone confuses a house cat, which weighs an average of 10 pounds, with a puma, which weighs on average more than 100 pounds, with the largest males pushing 220 pounds.
But it happens all the time even in close encounters, like the incident this summer in which a man riding a dirt bike swore he was ambushed by a puma only for DNA to establish beyond doubt that his attacker was a domestic kitty. For what it’s worth, he still swears it was a mountain lion.
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“People aren’t ready for us to turn carnivore cats vegan but I’m going to do it,” the CEO of a vegan cat food brand has vowed.
In September of last year, a research paper about feline health was published to the open-access journal PLOS-One, going mostly unnoticed.
The paper’s authors claim their research proves cats fed a “nutritionally complete” vegan diet are not only just as healthy as their meat-eating counterparts, they’re actually less likely to need veterinary visits, less dependent on medication, and more likely to be given a clean bill of health by their veterinarians.
When a company called Wild Earth announced the launch of a new line of vegan cat food this month, the company pointed directly to that paper as proof that “cats fed nutritionally sound vegan diets are healthier overall than those fed meat-based diets,” as the paper’s lead author put it.
Wild Earth CEO Ryan Bethencourt, who does not have a professional background in veterinary medicine or feline nutrition, summed up his goal in a tweet: “People aren’t ready for us to turn carnivore cats vegan but I’m going to do it.”
Bethencourt calls the effort to put pets on vegan diets “vegan biohacking.” Credit: Wild Earth
He painted the new offering as a bold counter to skeptics who say vegan cat food is unhealthy.
“We expect aggressive resistance from the meat industry on the launch of this industry-pioneering vegan cat food, but we know there are A LOT of cat parents looking for healthier plant-based and more sustainable options and we want to be the leader in providing them with that choice,” Bethencourt wrote in a statement.
What he didn’t mention was the fact that the loudest voices opposing “vegan cat food” are animal welfare organizations like the SPCA and Humane Society, as well as veterinarians and nutritionists, the same people who see the consequences of cats who are deprived of meat. Over the years they have reiterated that felines are obligate carnivores who have evolved to get their nutrients from meat, with digestive systems that cannot process most plants, meaning they can’t break them down and derive nutrients from them. That’s why we don’t see servals or leopards foraging for fruit in the wild.
In addition, the announcement did not mention that the 2023 research was funded by ProVeg International, a non-profit dedicated to reducing global meat consumption, weaning people and animals off of meat and onto plant-based food.
That didn’t stop other credulous reports, like one from GreenQueen claiming Wild Earth’s vegan cat food is “built on research proving that felines can be healthy on a vegan diet.”
And that’s exactly the point — the “study” was conceived and published so that advocates of vegan cat food can point to it and say “science says” cats can survive on plants.
Bad data makes for bad science
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but the 2023 study did not examine veterinary records or log the results of vet visits over years. Instead, the data was self-reported by participants.
A total of 1,418 people responded to the survey, and only 127 of them said they feed their cats exclusively vegan diets. The claims that their cats get sick less often and do better in veterinary check-ups are based on their subjective assessments and recollections. The paper’s authors don’t know which vegan brands the 127 respondents were giving to their cats, nor do they have information on whether the food was wet or dry, how often the cats were fed, and how much they ate.
A cat eating Wild Earth’s Unicorn Pate, which is made entirely from plant products. Credit: Wild Earth
One of the metrics cited by the authors is “guardian opinion of more severe illness,” which means arbitrary feedback from people who aren’t experts in veterinary medicine or nutrition.
If including respondent opinions as “data” doesn’t bother you, consider how many people buy products like Airborne, concluding that it works because they didn’t get sick once on a cross-country flight. Airborne, you may recall, was “invented” by a teacher who claimed she figured out how to cure the common cold, something no physician has done in centuries of trying.
Like vegan cat food proponents, Airborne had its own “study” that claimed its efficacy. The company eventually paid out more than $23 million in a class action settlement for its false claims. That’s not to say vegan cat food makers are precisely like Airborne, but pointing to poorly conducted research is a tactic that works because most people won’t go to the effort of finding the study and reading it.
Current global meat consumption is unsustainable, but…
I’m a vegetarian and I’ve seen enough evidence to convince me that the current rate of meat consumption, especially in the first world, is untenable as the global population rises toward its expected 11 billion-plus peak. Those forecasts and the horrors of factory farming are motivation enough to hope human civilization consumes less meat in the future.
But I’m also a guy who loves his cat, and I think if you’re going tell me that my little pal, designed by nature to be an obligate carnivore with a digestive system and body plan that hasn’t significantly changed for ages, can stop eating meat entirely with no deleterious effects — despite the experts saying otherwise — then you really need to show me something better than a self-reported survey paid for by a vegan advocacy group.
This cat is not happy. Credit: r/cats(reddit)
Especially when veterinarians who have no financial interest in the pet food industry relate horror stories of their four-legged patients slowly going blind and cats with no other ailments suffering catastrophic consequences, with their organs shutting down because they’re not getting the vital nutrients and proteins they need to survive.
It’s a horrific way to die, and it happens because misguided people think human morals should apply to cats. Notice in the press releases and marketing materials from vegan cat food manufacturers, there’s no mention of what’s in the best interest of cats — it’s all about people making “bold” choices, “disrupting” industries and leading the Earth to a shiny future without meat or suffering.
The truth is, felines cannot synthesize the proteins that are absolutely necessary for their survival, and their digestive systems aren’t evolved for breaking down nutrients from plants. Those are well-established facts, and ignoring them will not change reality. So anyone who claims “vegan cat food” is healthy faces a much bigger task than asking people to take a self-reported survey. A survey paid for by a nonprofit that lobbies for veganism isn’t proof, it’s wishful thinking masquerading as science.
Even if the authors of the paper had the complete veterinary records of the same cats, it would only be one tentative first step toward challenging everything we know about cat nutrition. Questions aren’t settled after one study, especially with such a small data set. Studies must be repeatable, and the difference between correlation and causation isn’t settled with a single well-designed, unimpeachable study, much less a self-reported survey.
When the stakes are the lives, happiness and health of innocent animals, we should be absolutely sure we’re doing right by them.
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