even as a kid we all liked little forts and boxes etc, which is itself interesting. snow caves were awesome; makes me wonder if it's a primeval instinct somehow.

All of a cat's senses and weapons face forward. It makes purfect sense to have its back protected from an attack from behind.

Let's see if it (or crossbreeds) can be tamed.

Clearly you are not a cat person ... the question is not if it can be tamed, but how quickly it can tame the humans around it ... ;-)

There's a YouTube (and other) channel out there about a guy and his (I use the possessive with caveats) coyote (named Weave). His motto is "Anything can be a pet if you don’t mind getting bit."

I think the lady that got mauled to death in 2018 at the lion preserve that guy works at might disagree with you if she hadn’t been y’know, mauled to death by a lion.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/28/africa/woman-killed-lion-...

"I'd be getting scared when a cat reaches the 20kg threshold" - most likely even 10kg cat will shred you before you could blink. They're insanely fast and surprisingly strong for size. Furry explosives they are

my cat at its peak weight is about 8kg, and that's the size that i'd get a bit nervous around if i didn't know it's a tame housecat that runs away at sight of a mouse...

See also "why you should never put a chimp and a little person in the same room" by Penn Gillette

As I wrote, they're adaptable. But there's a difference between true pack animals with an established hierarchy and being solitary but being open to other cats and species. Certainly, some cats are more pack-like (lions) and others are, or are more open to, being largely solitary.

I have 2 cats that are sisters. They have a very interesting dynamic. There isn't a fixed dominant sibling, they switch back and forth.

They antagonise each-other most of the time, but they also support each other in times of stress. If one goes to the vet and the other doesn't, the initial reaction is hissing and being a dick. Then, after a few minutes, it's licking and comforting.

I don't like to anthropomorphise too much, but they definitely look out for each-other. Equally, they definitely annoy each-other.

Domestic cats, are pack animals under some conditions.

Those and lions are the only cats known that don't mind to tolerate friends and non relatives around in their territories, cats clearly enjoy the company, form hierarchies and share food. Hyaenas and mongooses are related with cats and definitely social also. Lingsangs on the other way, are solitary.

My main coon is over 10kg and is basically harmless

I've watched a lot of horror shows that had no effect on me. But this one wasn't a horror show, it was for real. I found it very disturbing. I couldn't believe what I was watching.

And you'd think Tippi Hedren would have learned not to go around wild, untamed animals after what her character wrnt through in The Birds!

I remember seeing a wildcat in a sanctuary in Costa Rica with a similar story (the kittens looked like housecat kittens, so someone adopted them, but the adult cat's behavior was different enough to be really challenging). I've been trying to remember the exact species I saw there (maybe an oncilla?), but apparently there are several kinds of wildcat fairly easily mistaken for housecats as kittens.

I think not all of them categorically refuse to be pets, but they're noticeably more aggressive and less affectionate compared to housecats.

Yeah it’s not the only one known.

Unfortunately while people are going wild as if someone found a never-before-seen cat, this is actually more “after genetic analysis we now know that the tiger cats that everyone already knew about in Bolivia are actually a different species to the ones in Brazil”.

But that’s not very exciting so people and news outlets seem to be running with the story as if nobody had ever seen one before.

I very much appreciate the correction, thank you.

Similar looking to the KodKod

train is the wrong approach. you earn respect with them, and then they defend you.

lol moment was when we with a girlfriend playfully fell down on sofa, but the then master-of-house siberian 6kg cat considered that a threat to me.

he jumped ~3m claws open, smashed a desk top lamp, shredded the gfs' top and basically opened up her back before I could stop him.

Yeah, do be careful though. This happened maybe 15 miles from where I live, back in 2018:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/two-attacked-by-co...

Getting old now, so walking in the woods alone is something I don't do anymore, even though things are a lot more developed nearby.

My cousin, D. used to work in a National Park and had an international intern worker C. who decided to walk to work every morning through the park. D. had warned her to be cautious of mountain lions in that area. One morning D. was driving to work and saw her walking and not very far behind her a mountain lion making a 'stalk' approach and D. was able to get her attention and direct her attention to the mountain lion. C. hurried to D's car to ride the rest of the way to work and decided to accept the standing offer or a ride to work.

If you choose to trail run in mountain lion country, a bell may scare off bears, but may have the opposite effect for mountain lions. Stay aware, don't wear headphones or zone out on the trail.

I have seen three separate stalk and harvest events, the cow elk was my first and closest. My second was a wild burro colt. The the third was an old javelina (collared peccary). The second was by far the scariest, as the puma actually bit over the mouth and nose of the colt and suffocated it.

Fear is the correct emotion with regards to these wild animals. If you want to see one, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum (really a zoo, in spite of the name) is the best and safest way I know about. I would never willingly try to find one in the wild unless i had a hunting permit for one, and I'm not inclined to do that.

I have Bengal cat. Absolute love

I don't think they'll hybridise - Leopardus has 36 Chromosomes, while all other cats have 38.

Wikipedia doesn't have a page dedicated to it yet.

Someone has been typing quickly...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilcayo_tiger_cat

Murder mittens.

I'd love to rub my nose on their belly. I don't care about my ears anyway

It's a sign of the times that I'd probably think "AI-generated" if I saw those images without any surrounding context.

(Maybe a few years ago, I might've thought "great Photoshop job" instead...)

...and it's very cute

Great, so people will find a way to have it as their pet in horrible living conditions.

https://archive.ph/cgMTM

To add to the confusion, the genus is Leopardus. And leopards and jaguars are both Panthera.

My German grandmother did it, too.

No, it's somewhat common here in Brazil too.

Probably worked because the cats grew up with it too!

And Romanians.

Can confirm that non-greek Americans do this as well.

We do it in Italy too, afair (I'm a bit in doubt if we also do "tch tch tch")

making a clicking noise with your tongue or something

I still do that today, and it works better than pspspspsps. When I was young, if my cat was outside on the porch I could click my tongue and he'd come running from a half block away. What a good kitty he was.

We also do it in Spain, I think it is the international cat calling code.

We do it in America

pspspsps is biological , it's common noise to get a cats attention (in many places) because it stimulates their prey drive.

I'm from America, and we do spspspsp.

It's common. But I tend to find people in the south east of England barely talk to one another. :)

"Cunting"! Not just "cunt" but "cunting"! I learned so much from this thread! :D

That's a worldwide thing, as well as other stupid human noises ;)

Tch tch tch

wait where in Canada do they don't do pspspsps?

(is there a francophone different one?)

Well it seems everyone uses that! Thanks guys, I had no idea and this is so interesting to know. Now I wonder if someone has made some kind of study about it. I'll go looking.

A fun book is Bad Magic by Stephan Zielinski. Kind of an awkward one to find since it's a common title from a while back (2004) at the very start of urban fantasy... and the author didn't appear to have written anything else.

At one point in the book, several of the characters are in South America looking for a jaguar. They ask the synesthetic mage of their group (each character has a different magical background)...

    “Got anything to call a jaguar?”
    Rider purses his lips. “Well … there is one incantation. But I’m not sure it’ll work. Even the most skilled thaumaturges can’t pull it off more than a quarter of the time.”
    Sturgeon shrugs. “May as well try it, Al.”
    Rider nods. “Okay. Be quiet, everybody.” He rolls his head on his neck, holds up his arms. Takes several deep breaths. Opens his mouth. Intones, “Here, kitty kitty kitty … here, kitty…”
    Chloe throws a clot of mud in his face as Rider dissolves into whoops of laughter. Everybody shakes their heads in disgust and they troop off into the green.

I for one welcome our new feline Overlords.

Desperately trying to find a video with the original meowing sound...

That's a good looking kitty!

On a related paw, Leopardus guigna (güiña) in Anticura goes by the cute name of kodkod:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodkod#/media/File:Leopardus_g...

They still have widespread international distribution.

Personally I thought the internet would have been a bigger threat to their readership.

Beautiful. Can't believe how mini and colorful.

Wow, I expected it to be a DNA based split or something like that, but a genuinely new to science mammal is pretty cool!

It always surprises me when people discover new animal species. These little kittens look very cute.

Yeah that's what I'm curious about. "Known to locals" is very vague, and there are a lot of situations that could fit that description. The situation you mention is probably the most reasonable concrete interpretation, but my guess is that there was a game of telephone from locals -> scientists -> journalists -> wiki, and any nuance we could read into has been lost.

Babe, wake up! New cat just dropped!

Very good news that a new species was discovered that's not a microbe or a fungus!

when the researchers compared complete genomes from 38 individuals across the Leopardus genus, the results showed that not only was L. tilcayo different from the other tiger cat species, but it had diverged from them around 1.4 million years ago—an evolutionary distance comparable to that between modern lions and extinct cave lions.

So around 2.8 million divergence-years. Going by wikipedia, the divergence between lions and cave lions is much less:

Genetic analysis of ancient DNA has revealed that while closely related, it was a distinct species genetically isolated from the modern lion (Panthera leo), with the genetic divergence between the two species estimated at 500,000 to 1 million years ago.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera_spelaea )

Theoretically, that's anywhere from 18% to 71% of the divergence. (The same page also notes that fossils of this species can be about 700,000 years old, which is philosophically interesting in combination with a divergence date of 500,000 years ago.) These are "comparable" in the sense that any two numbers can be compared, but it's not something you would usually say when one of the numbers is 50% larger than the other one. Even less so when it's 400% larger.

A genetic analysis of 38 cats from South and Central America, including 26 individuals in the Leopardus tigrinus species complex, revealed that the tigrinus complex consists of five distinct species, including L. tilcayo, which is believed to have split off from other Leopardus species over 1.4 million years ago.[5] The study incorporated genetic material from previously unsampled tiger cats in the Guianas region, near where L. tigrinus was originally described in 1775. Jonas Lescroart, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Antwerp, and co-lead author of the study called it "the most complete genetic study yet" of tiger cats.

-Wikipedia

It will turn out to be a domestic cat that crossbred with some wild cat species. :D

Be careful, they are evolving, and everyone was worried that AI was taking over.

This looks like AI generated

A bunch of Pokémon playing cat ladies out there goes «Gotta catch’em all!»

I wonder how many different species of cat are just called "cats" in the local language of wherever they're found?

We have just got normal house cats, that we call cats. They're very cuddly and they're great for keeping the mice under control.

Somewhere in the forests of deepest Borneo is a civilisation only recently reached by primitive Westerners, who don't know how to make fire and cook food using only sticks and rocks, and who cannot tell the difference between the blackish-blue berries around 15mm that are good to eat and the blueish-black berries around 16mm that are spectacularly poisonous, and only know things like how to make jet aircraft and rifles and the Rolleiflex 2.8FX camera.

Wandering around their village, high in the mountains, are cats the size of Galloway bulls, terrifying looking things, teeth the size of cucumbers.

"Oh those? Yes, we call those 'cats'. They're very cuddly, and they're great for keeping the feral hogs under control."