Tag: everything’s better with jaguars

So this morning’s Panthera onca research is focused on the question of whether jaguars purr, to which the answer seems to be: yes, though in a quieter growlier way than the typical domestic housecat, and only when breathing out, not in.

Cheetahs, on the other hand, can’t roar but purr quite well, judging from this clip.

But the old notion that cats can either roar or purr but not both is no longer being considered true.

Meanwhile: The world also contains dozens of species of small wild felines who live in isolated and not-so-isolated populations around the world and aren’t nearly as splashy as jaguars and mountain lions. Today’s discovery (for me at least) is the Andean Mountain Cat, which lives at high altitude, rarely seen and little studied.

Wikipedia claims there are no Andean cats in captivity, a notion that makes me happy (for all that I’ve been studying cats in captivity these past weeks), but I’ve yet to find a source for that, so it may be as inaccurate as it is compelling. At any rate, there may in the future be captive breeding programs as part of conservation measures.

And lnhammer brings to my attention the Iriomote cat, a subspecies of leopard cat that lives on a single Japanese island.

Because the world is filled with secret cats.