30 Interesting Facts about Wild Cats

The Jaguar is, in fact, native to North American and there is still a population of these cats living in southern Arizona and New Mexico.

2. All captive white tigers can be traced to a single tiger origin. Every white tiger since has been inbred again and again causing major deformities at birth. They are also not a subspecies, thus not endangered, and only kept around to bring in more money.

3. Cheetahs can’t roar. They can only meow because of the absence of the hyoid bone in their neck.

4. The Bornean Bay Cat is one of the rarest wild cats in the world. Only 12 specimens have been studied between the years of 1874 and 2002, and the species was never caught on film until 2009.

5. The Clouded Leopard has the largest canine teeth-to-body ratio of any cat, and is referred to as "the modern saber-tooth."

A toothless geriatric lion named Frasier successfully sired 35 cubs after lionesses turned down countless healthy males before him.

7. Lynx cats became extinct in Britain approximately 1,300 years ago and there are serious plans now to re-introduce them into the wild.

8. Tigers in China are bred in captivity. Those in captivity far outnumber the amount of wild tigers, as tigresses are made to produce cubs at 3 times their natural rate by weaning cubs off to pigs and dogs. They are bred to produce tiger bone wine.

9. The Amazonian Margay wildcat has the uncanny ability to mimic the distress call of a baby monkey to lure adult monkeys to its doom.

10. The black panther is not a species but a melanistic (opposite to albinistic) jaguar or leopard.

A jaguar’s primary killing canine teeth have nerves that help find the perfect point to clamp down to maximize killing effectiveness.

12. The cougar, mountain lion, puma, panther, and catamount are all actually the same cat, the Puma concolor.

13. Cheetah's average stride when it is running at full speed is around 22 feet in length.

14. Asiatic lions still inhabit India's Gujarat state, making them the only lions to naturally live outside of Africa.

15. A tiger's tongue is so course, it can lick flesh down to the bone.

Sometimes female lions can develop manes. Such masculine females likely occur when the embryo is disrupted, either at conception or while in the womb.

17. If the last of Iberian lynx population died out, it would be the first feline species to become extinct since prehistoric times.

18. The Pallas cat looks super-expressive because its face is short and its pupils are round like ours.

19. The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, with over 40 in English alone.

20. The sand cat can survive in temperatures ranging from −5 °C (23 °F) to 52 °C (126 °F) and although they will drink when water is available, they are able to survive for months on the water in their food.

Tigers have striped skin not just striped fur. The stripes are like fingerprints and no two tigers have the same pattern.

22. Ligers continue growing throughout their entire lives due to a genetic disorder called growth dysplasia. They grow twice the size of their parents (mother is a tiger and father is a Lion). The largest cat in the world is a 922lb Liger.

23. There is a sub species of tigers with dark blue fur named Maltese Tiger, but they're now practically extinct.

24. In some areas, leopards commonly hunt dogs. They will even carry off dogs much larger than them, such as the Tibetan Mastiff and Newfoundland, that is used to protect from them. Iron collars are sometimes used to protect the dog's necks so they have a chance of surviving the initial attack.

25. Jackie the lion, one of the mascots for MGM, not only survived two train wrecks, an earthquake, a boat sinking, and an explosion at the studio, but also a plane crash that left him stranded in the Arizona wilderness for days.