Alternate timeline: “You can’t have them because they’re unpredictable and might claw your eyes out without provocation.”
This timeline: “WTF happened to you?”
“My cat decided to wake me up by clawing my eyes out.”
“Hahaha!”
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
835 points (98.0% liked)
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I feel like the standard zookeeper line would be "because these are apex predators, and their presence would have an incredibly adverse effect on any ecosystem they're introduced to".
This is one of the things I don't understand about people who think having tigers as "pets" is a good idea. I've had a cat randomly decided to latch on to my arm, claws, teeth, and all a few times. Not a lot. Just a few. Obviously I was fine. Now imagine this house cat weighs 450 lbs. Not super confident that I'm going to be fine in that scenario.
Well, cats learn how to bite without causing damage. Tigers aren't socialized with humans, so they learn the levels of bite appropriate to other tigers.
You're saying that like cats socialized with humans never once bite or scratch hard enough to harm. It's not the thousands of play bites that are the problem, it's when they randomly crunch down and unmake your shoulder instead of making you dig out the neosporin.
Cat is absolutely capable of biting your finger off, yet when socialised properly they limit themselves with occasional excited scratching and light biting.
But just to be clear, I'm not advocating for having a tiger as a per.
A feral cat is nothing to trifle with. My mom brought a cat home once from her coworker but it was a street cat that freaked the fuck out in the new environment. Almost severed one of the tendons in my mother's hand and in the end it took 3 full grown men to get it out of our house.
That's my point, 99.99% gentle is fine when they're mostly harmless, the problem with large predators is that .01% event puts you in the hospital if it doesn't kill you outright. A tiger's excited pounce can break half the bones in your body, an excited swipe can disembowel. If those little kickers start going, you lose everything below the waist.
Having large predators for a pet pretty much always ends badly unless they get taken away in time.
A properly socialized cat will not be biting and scratching you. That's a skill issue
Even the most well trained and socialized cats will still bite or scratch sometimes when excited or startled. Pretty much every cat owner has a story where their cat suddenly zoomed across them with claws out or randomly chomped instead of play biting. It's going to happen eventually, and that goes double with an undomesticated predator.
There's a reason why zookeepers are extremely careful with large cats, even when they raised them from cubs. No amount of professional socialization makes them safe.
"God invented cats so we could have a little tiger to pet."
Victor Hugo
"I swear that North American Puppy at the zoo wanted me to rub its belly, if it weren't for the glass! We had a connection, I could just tell, I'm not crazy!"
I literally experience this when I see bears. Where's our cute tiny bear species that is happy as a pet? I want my microbear!
I was at the Calgary Zoo last week and I watched a blonde bear being hunted relentlessly by two darker bears. The consensus was that they were playing and everyone was having a good laugh, but the longer it went on, the less the blonde bear appeared to be having fun. But the darker bears just kept going. I couldn't help but wonder, what if the blonde bear was going to be eaten by the other bears, and he's just trapped in this exhibit, doomed to run perpetual circles until he finally collapses and gets ripped apart by the others?
I don't know where the fuck I was going with this one. I just wanted to rescue that blonde bear from his cruel friends. Maybe he'd make a good candidate for a housebear. I didn't get a photo of him, but I did manage to snap this awkward pic of a meerkat.
Good news. Bears are the same order as Dogs: Dogs are your Microbears!
The order is Carnivora. So by your logic, cats are microbears too. Not a bad attempt, but I don't think that's satisfying enough for bear lovers. You're right they are more related to dogs than to cats (superfamily Canoidea), but that's still not enough. We need an Ursidae pet, that's the only way.
In China, a family adopted a bear and raised it for two years thinking it was a Tibetan Mastiff. This story went viral like two years ago.
I need at least same-genus to be satisfied. Dogs aren't bear enough to sate my micro-bear wants.
🎶Microbears the goodest boys of them all!
*sung to Action Man theme*
I also like bears, just not that kind...
I've seen cats in zoos before
I'd go to that zoo
Then go to Belfast Zoo in the UK
I'm in the UK. Anything in NI is abroad to me haha
How about Scotland then? We have wildcats in a zoo.
https://www.highlandwildlifepark.org.uk/animals/animal-inhabitants/wildcat
It's not! You don't need a passport to get here, the currency is exactly the same and your phone will work the same, driving licence as well, etc. You can get a boat or an aeroplane (usually the better option). The aeroplane is usually only a 20 minute flight as well. It's just like going to Scotland or Wales, but there's a sea separating us.
We voted for brexit to get rid of all this open mindedness and acceptance! It is FOREIGN and therefore awful. And brexit has no flaws!
Brexit hasn't affected travel between mainland UK and Northern Ireland. Unless you're transporting guns or uncut diamonds or other stuff
No of course not brexit has no flaws. I saw a tiktok reel on his flawless it is so I'm pretty much an expert
It wasn't flawless either; it was a pain for businesses and their supply chain
Yeah, and then there were allergies. Fuck allergies.
I have cat allergies and still can't help it. I've been forced to learn extremely good cleaning habits, as a plus.
Glad you're able to enjoy cats! It's not an option for everyone as severity varies.
I like to imagine in another reality, we ride lions and Panthers. And also for some reason have miniature horses.
Now you've said that I want a real life, living horse that I could put in my pocket. Imagine everyone carrying around their pocket horse, getting them out for tiny races, slipping them a blade of grass to munch on, whimsical as fuck
Basically a rabbit with inverted body proportions
Feel like id step on them 
accidentally
Battlecat.
I'd be surprised if we didn't
This is for every pet. We don’t deserve them.
I do
Edit: I bet you do too.
Thanks for that :)
I totally love the energy of the poster in OPs image, it's so warm and wholesome.
That said, it's probably true that cats (and dogs for that matter) have a variety of coat patterns because of domestication. Not only do humans choose to breed pets for their coat variations, selecting for tamer, friendlier animals actually also just introduces a variety of differences from their wild counterparts. Coat color is one of them.
https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/197/3/795/5935921?login=false
But the [related traits from domestication] as a whole, with its diverse array of affected morphological traits, clearly cannot be caused simply by alterations of adrenal function. What, therefore, might be the common factor? What all of these diverse traits, including the adrenals, share is that their development is closely linked to neural crest cells (NCCs). NCCs are the vertebrate-specific class of stem cells that first appear during early embryogenesis at the dorsal edge (“crest”) of the neural tube and then migrate ventrally throughout the body in both the cranium and the trunk, giving rise to the cellular precursors of many cell and tissue types and indirectly promoting the development of others (Carlson 1999; Hall 1999; Gilbert 2003; Trainor 2014).
Edit: the adrenal gland is mentioned here because lessening the function of the "flight or flight" response appears to makes friendlier animals with better temperament for domestication. The idea is that domestic animals were selected for temperament first, and everything else is less important (why would you keep an animal that won't stop biting you?).
Yeah; I don't have the spoons to give a supporting link but I remember that being borne out in the fox-domestication experiment, as well (along with other traits that seemed to align with the domestication process – as well –, such as floppy, folded ears); same reason domesticated cattle have developed spots.
This one got me for a minute.