38 thoughts on “Felid of the day”

  4. Funny anecdote about my experience with zookeepers.

    A lot of young men/boys mentions the big cats as favourite animals in regards to work, and a lot of young women/girls were into the primates/monkeys.

    I wonder if that is a tendency.

    2. I’d like the reptiles myself but I’m always a statistical freak amongst women, starting with being an atheist and including working in IT.

      1. I was/is into the big cats and wolves, but mainly worked with monkeys and herbivores.

        I did get to feed the snakes a few times, but unfortunately they were a bit sensitive regarding food so we had to do the killing for them. ( Cute albino rabbits and mice ).

        I never got used to that.

      2. Is it really that odd, women working in IT? I thought the industry was rife with us. I am an ex-ITer too (computer systems design, many moons ago).

  5. Wow, those are some seriously strong kitty legs. Especially when hen you consider the weight of an adult tiger and the fact that the animal jumped from a crouch and not a running start.

  6. > proportionately as high as your domestic moggie,

    The jump is impressive in itself, no doubt, but is it *really* proportionately as high as that of a smaller cat? I wouldn’t expect that to be the case — square-cube law and all that.

    Are there studies out there on cat jumps with numbers that we can actually compare?

    1. Loki, our young cat leaps twice his body length every meal. In this impressive leap, the tiger looks to be getting his back paws about one body length above the ground here.

    2. Yeah I agree with you in that I think a smaller cat could jump higher in proportion to its height. Could an average domestic cat jump five times its height?

      1. If we take height to mean height at the shoulder while standing — say around 20 cm — then yes, a typical domestic cat can easily jump five times that height, and perhaps as much as ten times.

      2. Could an average domestic cat jump five times its height?

        The tips of Baihu’s ears are about fourteen inches off the ground. Five times that is about 5’8″, which just happens to be my own height. Yeah, he can jump that….

        b&

          1. I have no clue how I’d get that dimension. For one, it’s wintertime, and moments where there’s enough warmth and Sun for him to stretch out like that are a bit rare. For another, when he does, he bends a considerable amount the other way. That, and I’m not sure I have a tape measure long enough…you simply wouldn’t believe how long a cat cat become when it so chooses….

            b&

    3. Yeah, actually house cats can jump proportionately higher. There’s a video I once published showing an amazing leap from a crouching position of a cat going after a toy. I don’t have it at hand.

      1. This may be the one. It’s shots of a Japanese kitty jumping for a toy in slow motion, up to nearly two meters.

        youtu.be/_WEMtYj2pJc

  7. The tiger was just making sure that everyone knows that it can get over that fence any time it wants to.

    1. I was thinking that myself. 😀

      Maybe it can’t do height & distance at the same time…

      1. Seems pretty clear that the only reason the tigers stay on their side of the fence is because that’s where they’d rather be, for whatever reason….

        b&

        1. As long as the servants on the other side of the fence keep tossing meat over it, why ruin a good thing ?

  8. Of course, the tiger in the video only jumps high enough to catch the meat. We can’t see how high it CAN jump.

    Our Fuzzy — your average rescue street cat — loved birds and would regularly jump, from a standing crouch, clearing our 6 foot fence, to snag a bird in flight.

  11. “tigers can jump proportionately as high as your domestic moggie”

    Surely that’s not strictly true? The square-cube law prevents big things from jumping like little things. In the video, the cat jumped maybe a body length high, but kitty cats seem to be able to jump several body lengths.

    1. Agreed. Domestic cats of my acquaintance can jump perhaps two meters. For a tiger to do the same proportionally would require jumping eight or ten meters. The leap we see in the video looks to be in the neighborhood of three meters.

      1. Comment #8 did raise a good point about that though. Maybe the tiger could jump higher; s/he probably wouldn’t want to jump higher than the meat.

  13. I for one am hoping Jerry has a cuddly experience with much younger tigers while he is in tiger country.

  14. This reminds me of a story told to me by an Indian conservationist. There are places in India where tourists come to see wild tigers, viewing them from the “safety” of the back of an elephant. In fact there seems to be nothing but an unspoken truce protecting those tourists. My friend told me that once, an elephant with three people on its back got close to a mother with cubs (they didn’t do it on purpose, they just couldn’t see the cubs in the tall grass). Suddenly they saw the grass coming to life–it was the mother tiger getting up speed to make one of those jumps. She leaped through the air and knocked the mahout off the elephant.

    Then came the amazing thing- the elephant took its foot and pinned the tiger to the ground, without crushing it, to give the mahout enough time to climb back up the elephant. The elephant did not hurt the tiger, and the tiger did not struggle. It was as if they had an understanding between them.

    The first part of this story (the tiger’s jump) was captured on a video that my friend showed me. Maybe it is on YouTube somewhere….

    1. Crap, I should have looked at that link in Muffy’s (#12) comment before posting my story. The first person quoted in the linked article, Vivek, is my the Indian conservationist who told me the story and showed me the video. That linked article gives some additional details about the incident, and confirms that the video is on YouTube.

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