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| Billie Silvey |
| January 2007 |
| Big Cats When I was growing up in West Texas, mountain lions, or pumas, still roamed the canyons to the north of my home, and we could sometimes hear their harsh screams when we drove past the canyons in the evening. They were beautiful animals. I once saw one that had been trapped too close to town and was being kept in a cage before being released into the wild. It was a sensuous, sinuous creature. |
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| A World of CATS |
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| Except for one visit to a zoo in Fort Worth, televised nature shows, and cut-away scenes in Tarzan movies where the scenery didn’t match, it was the first big cat I’d seen until we moved to Los Angeles. We took our children to zoos here and in San Diego. But our favorite encounter with the large beasts was at Lion Country Safari in Orange County. You could drive through the park and watch animals in a savannah-like setting that gave them much more freedom and was more like seeing them in their native habitat. The main rule was to stay in the car and keep the windows rolled up! |
| Cats are found all over the world, except in Australia, New Zealand and Madagascar. They are carnivores, together with dogs, bears and other meat-eating mammals, but they make up to the Felidae (feline) family. Wild cats include lions, tigers, leopards and cheetahs and are found mostly in warm or tropical countries. |
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| Some wild cats are not much larger than housecats. The largest, the Siberian tiger, grows up to fourteen feet long. The structure of a tabby cat, however, is not very that different from that of a tiger. Both have rounded, bullet-shaped heads, short faces, large eyes and long, sensitive whiskers. They have erect, pointed ears, and most have long tails. Their tongues are covered with pointed papillae that, in some big cats, are rough enough to draw blood with a lick. Silent and graceful, they walk on their toes. They have five in front and only four in back. Most cats can draw their claws into sheaths above the pads of their feet. Cats are known for their speed, being among the fastest-moving mammals on earth. They are agile, have quick reflexes and can go instantly from total relaxation to fighting alert. |
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| Cats usually travel and hunt alone. Though they are live mostly on the ground, some climb trees. They are active at night. Meticulous about cleanliness, cats spend a lot of time grooming, though they don’t like water. Most of the 36 cat species are in danger of becoming extinct within the next 25 years from losing their hunting grounds to agriculture or from being forced out by natural disasters, killed by hunters, or trapped to sell. Big cats are not suited to be pets. Despite the fact that their kittens are cute and cuddly-looking, they grow up to be wild animals. Those who buy big cats soon learn just how ill-suited they are, and end up giving them away to reserves like Big Cats of Serenity Springs, a Colorado nonprofit which is home to over 120 big cats. |
| Little Cats Domestic cats have been a part of my life since I was young. As a child, we lived on a farm where cats helped reduce the rodent population in the barn. My earliest memories of cats is catching and stroking some of these near-wild creatures. I caught pinkeye once and had a ringworm another time for my enthusiasm. Cats were domesticated by Egyptians some 8,000 years ago. Pedigree breeds weren’t developed until the 19th century. Now there are 300 distinct breeds of domestic cats, distinguished by their head shapes and the length of their hair. More breeds are shorthair than longhair. The origin of the domestic cat is questioned, though most think it resulted from a jungle cat from Africa mating with a European wild cat For the most part, domestic cats are just scaled down and more or less housebroken versions of big cats. |
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