Pets form an important part of many people's lives, providing meaningful companionship. However, our pets can sometimes also be a source of unwelcome pathogens and diseases, particularly if they frequently roam outdoors.

We are ecologists and a veterinarian who study wildlife health and the movement of pathogens among wildlife, domestic animals and people. If you let your cat outdoors, or if outdoor cats visit your yard, our recent findings may be relevant.

Zoonotic pathogens are organisms that can infect both animals and humans. From a pathogen's perspective, humans are just another animal host. Wildlife is often emphasized as a source of emerging disease for humans because there are vastly more wild animal species than domestic animal species.

However, even if a pathogen is capable of infecting people, it needs a way to reach us. Humans share more zoonotic pathogens with domestic animals than with wildlife, because domestic animals live close to us. Pathogens benefit even further if they can infect a companion animal.

In our newly published research, we compiled data from more than 400 studies to investigate how a cat's lifestyle, whether they're mostly indoors, outdoor-roaming or feral, affects that cat's likelihood of carrying pathogens that can infect people.

Across this compilation, there were nearly 100 pathogens detected in cats that are considered zoonotic and capable of infecting humans. Familiar examples are rabies, Toxoplasma gondii, roundworms and Salmonella.

Our research

We found that outdoor-roaming pet cats had three to five times the odds of carrying a zoonotic pathogen compared with indoor-only cats. More surprisingly, cats allowed to roam outdoors had similar odds of carrying at least one zoonotic pathogen as feral cats. Outdoor-owned cats carried fewer types of pathogens than feral cats, but the same pathogens that infect feral cats can also infect owned cats.

These risks become a large-scale problem because pet cats that roam freely interact closely with people, wildlife and other domestic animals. Across the studies we reviewed, about 60 per cent of owned cats had unsupervised outdoor access; in some regions, that rate exceeded 90 per cent.

Roaming cats hunt, interact with wildlife or other domestic animals, and move through environments contaminated with pathogens and toxins. Research suggests that cat owners may underestimate hunting by around 80 per cent, meaning that many prey captures and animal contacts go unnoticed.

These interactions are not uncommon and not limited to so-called pest species. Single-country estimates of wildlife killed by cats run into the billions, with more than 2,000 wildlife species documented as prey for domestic cats.

Cats hunt animals that can carry zoonotic pathogens, including rodents, birds and bats, many of which would otherwise have little direct contact with people. Owned cats might bring home rodents carrying viruses, and there are documented cases of cats bringing rabies-positive bats into homes. A cat returning home with prey can therefore create a pathway by which pathogens circulating in wildlife populations reach people.

In addition, it is not only owners who are at risk. Outdoor cats defecate in gardens, parks, playgrounds and other shared spaces, potentially leading to high contamination rates. One study estimated that outdoor cats deposited more than 60 tonnes [60 tons] of feces per 10,000 households each year.

Depending on the parasite, feces can contain hundreds to hundreds of thousands of parasite eggs that can persist in soil or water for months to years, which can infect people or other animals that come in contact with those eggs.

What cat owners can do

The most straightforward intervention is also the most economical and humane: prevent unsupervised roaming. That does not mean denying cats access to the outdoors. It can mean building "catios" or enclosures, leash walks, supervised time outside or other forms of contained outdoor access.

Veterinary care still matters. Treating existing parasitic infections and vaccinating against diseases like rabies are essential precautions, even for indoor cats. Since neither vaccines nor anti-parasitic treatment cover the full spectrum of wildlife-associated pathogens, managing exposure remains the more comprehensive protective approach.

The free-roaming debate is often framed as a false choice: either cats roam freely, or they are deprived of a natural life. That framing is misleading and inconsistent with how we manage other companion animals.

We do not assume dogs need unrestricted access to roads, neighbors' yards or to hunt wildlife to have good welfare. Indoor cats and cats with supervised outdoor access can live healthy, enriched and longer lives.

Policies and strategies that address how and where owned cats roam outdoors can help safeguard biodiversity, feline and wildlife welfare and public health. That is the central insight of One Health, that the same choices that protect ecosystems can also protect the animals and people who share them.

This article was co-authored by David Lapen, who works for and receives research funding from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In this excerpt from "Cats: A History" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), author Rod Phillips, professor of history at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, examines a bizarre practice that began in the Middle Ages — putting animals on trials for "crimes" they had committed. Animals, including birds, insects and livestock, were taken to court and punished as humans would be. But there was a surprising outlier: law-abiding cats.

It might seem odd, even irrational, to blame cats for being cats. We might accept that it is simply the nature of cats and that while some individual cats tend to be more or less friendly toward humans, others remain consistently aloof.

But in the early modern period animals (and birds and insects) were attributed responsibility for their behavior as if they had the same agency and intentionality, and bore the same moral accountability, as humans. To this extent they could be punished for behavior that was deemed criminal or immoral.

A striking example is the trials of animals that were held throughout much of Europe from the Late Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century. (There were scattered cases in Europe after that time, and others in places as diverse as Russia, Brazil, the United States, and Canada.) In the early modern period animal trials seem to have been most common in France, but they also took place in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and occasionally in Britain, Spain, and Italy.

These trials ­were no dif­ferent from regular ­trials except that the defendant was not a human but an animal or, in some cases, several animals or a herd, flock, pack, or swarm of creatures. The indictments in animal trials were based on the law codes in force at the time and involved a range of crimes. Large mammals, such as cows and horses, sometimes killed humans and were charged with murder. Animals, notably sheep, that were subject to bestiality were said to have consented and were executed along with the human perpetrator.

The most common defendants in animal trials were pigs, which were widely kept in and around households in Europe at the time, and which sometimes killed and ate babies and small children. Animal trials were presided over by regular judges and the cases were argued by lawyers. The punishments, if the animals were found guilty, were the same as those imposed on humans: animals were imprisoned in jails where humans were incarcerated or executed by the same professional executioners who dispatched convicted humans. When they were fined, their ­owners ­were required to pay.

A dif­ferent sort of case involved suits in church courts against insects, rodents, and other vermin that had damaged crops. The defendants in these cases included locusts, leeches, rats, and mice, and when they were found guilty, they were generally excommunicated and sometimes ordered to go to places where they could do no harm.

There is a big difference between the place of animals in these cases and modern cases that involve animals that have caused harm. Dogs are sometimes ordered killed ("destroyed" is the usual term) by courts when they inflict serious injuries on ­people, but they are not found guilty of the offense in a formal sense, even though they perpetrated it. They are usually killed not to punish them but to prevent a recurrence and to protect other people. In many of these cases, the owner of the dog is punished in some way in addition to being deprived of their dog.

In the animal trials, in contrast, the animals themselves were found criminally responsible, and the owners were not punished, even if some were deprived of valuable animals or had to pay fines on their behalf. In an apparent exception in Chartres, France, in 1499, the parents of a child killed by their pig ­were ordered to pay a fine, but they ­were ordered to do so not because of their pig's actions but because they had failed to watch over their child more carefully.

There is some debate whether Europeans believed that non-human creatures had a sense of intentionality that made them as responsible as humans for their actions. Animal trials might instead show, suggests Emre Koyuncu, that the principles of being subject to the law "were not strictly grounded on rationality and intelligence." There is no explicit evidence that anyone participating in these cases believed that animals were rational in the same sense as humans, and some legal authorities clearly stated that they were not.

Yet the way these proceedings unfolded strongly implied culpability on the part of creatures found guilty. The unresolved issue is the extent to which a finding of guilt implied rationality and intentionality.

There is another phenomenon suggesting that non-human animals were believed capable of rational calculation of a human kind. It was a common practice, for many centuries, to hang dead or mutilated specimens of unwelcome animals so as to convince their fellow creatures to stay away. Sometimes referred to as a "gamekeeper's gibbet," the custom sometimes took the form of hanging rabbits or weasels from tree branches as a warning to others. It is analogous to the practices, also common in early modern Europe, of executing people in public and sticking the decapitated heads of executed criminals on spikes as a warning to passersby.

Whether they worked as deterrents we cannot know, but at least it had a chance with beings (people) who could draw a lesson from the sight of a severed head. If people thought that animals could draw the same lessons, it tells us about their understanding of the intellect and moral codes of animals.

Although a wide range of animals, birds, and insects were involved in animal trials, there are hardly any records of cats being charged with any crime. Even dogs, considered the most faithful of creatures, quite often found themselves on trial, usually for biting people — although there is one medieval account of a faithful dog that brought its master's murderer to court, where he was convicted and executed.

One compilation of animal trials from the ninth to 19th centuries lists almost 200 but not one cat is included among the defendants — which include dogs, wolves, grasshoppers, snails, goats, pigs, and ­horses. Even so, a satirical print (about 1690) by the Dutch artist Egbert van Heemskerck shows a female cat being tried by a monkey magistrate in the presence of various animal witnesses.

Cats participated in some animal trials, but not as defendants. In the early 16th century the rats of the diocese of Autun, in Burgundy, were summoned to appear before a court for having eaten the barley crop, but they failed to appear at the specified time. Their ­lawyer won the rats an extension by arguing that cats were watching for them, making their journey to the court perilous, and that no one should be expected to appear at the court unless they could do so safely. There is no record whether the rats later turned up to face the charge.

The reason no cats seem to have been arraigned in animal trials might simply have been that cats did not commit crimes that were serious enough. Unlike pigs they did not eat children, unlike dogs they did not bite people (at least, not seriously), unlike cattle they did not gore people to death, unlike locusts they did not ravage crops, and unlike a range of other creatures they were not involved in bestiality.

For all that might have been said against cats, they were remarkably law-abiding animals, even if because they did not have the physical ability, size, or dietary preferences to commit the offenses that landed other creatures in court. That did not prevent people from torturing and killing cats, but those were extrajudicial actions that were far removed from animal trials. When cats ­were identified as witches' familiars, however, it was another matter entirely.

They sleep on our beds, steal our food, and generally rule the house. Between them, cats and dogs make up two-thirds of pet ownership worldwide. But which of the two companion animals are we more closely related to?

The answer depends on how you look at the question.

"From an evolutionary perspective we are equally related to dogs and cats," Mark Springer, a professor emeritus of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at the University of California, Riverside, told Live Science in an email.

Cats, dogs and humans are all mammals. In the mammalian family tree, which maps out how different mammal species are related to one another, both cats and dogs belong to the order Carnivora, while humans are primates. These two groups split from a common ancestor about 90 million to 95 million years ago, Springer said. Meanwhile, cats and dogs split from each other much later, around 55 million years ago.

In terms of common ancestry, "dogs and cats are more closely related to mammals such as pangolins, horses, cows, whales, bats, shrews and moles than they are to humans," Springer said. And "humans are more closely related to colugos [flying lemurs], tree shrews, rabbits, rats, and mice than they are to cats and dogs."

Genetic ties

Another way of deciding which species we are more closely related to is through a genetic lens.

If you measure how much the DNA code has changed over time, humans are about equally related to cats and dogs, William Murphy, a comparative genomicist at Texas A&M University, told Live Science in an email.

However, scientists also compare how DNA strands are organized within chromosomes. Here, a difference emerges.

Murphy explained that the ancestors of modern-day dogs went through extensive chromosome rearrangements over evolutionary time. (Such rearrangements are not unique to dogs; they occur across different animal and plant species, though scientists don't fully understand why some lineages rearrange faster than others.) Cats, on the other hand, retained a genome organization that's closer to ours. "In terms of how genes are arranged within chromosomes, humans and cats are twice as similar to each other as humans are to dogs," he said.

Because the way DNA is organized affects how genes are switched on and off, cats may be a better model than dogs for understanding human gene regulation, Murphy said.

That also makes them useful for studying genetic diseases. For example, polycystic kidney disease occurs in both humans and cats, and treatments developed for cats could help inform therapies for people.

Cats may also provide clues about cancer. A recent study found that cancer-related genes in cats are strikingly similar to those in humans, both in number and variety. One notable example involves a gene called FBXW7, which was mutated in more than half of the feline mammary tumors studied. In humans, mutations in the same gene are linked to worse outcomes in breast cancer

That said, dogs are also used to model and analyze human illness, including Alzheimer’s disease, idiopathic epilepsy, eye disease and heart disease.

Although cats may share more similarities with humans in gene regulation, to date more research has focused on dogs. This may be due in part to the fact that the complete feline genome became available later than the canine genome, as well as historical bias — cats have long been perceived as less cooperative in research settings.

So, which are we more closely related to? From an evolutionary standpoint, it's a tie, but genetically, at least in terms of genome structure, we are closer to cats.

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Whether it's having the "eye of the tiger" or being lionhearted, references to lions and tigers evoke power and determination. That's not surprising given these animals are both large, powerful felines. But they are distinct species. So what do these iconic cats have in common, and how are they different?

To answer this question, let's consider the two species' appearances, evolutionary histories and how they live their lives as kings of their ecosystems.

Appearance and anatomy

The most obvious difference between modern lions (Panthera leo) and tigers (Panthera tigris) is their distinct physical appearances, particularly their coats.

"Just looking at them, you can clearly tell that tigers have stripes and lions don't," Dell Guglielmo, a zookeeper who cares for lions and tigers at Smithsonian's National Zoo, told Live Science. "The lion males have the large huge mane, and the females do not." In contrast, male and female tigers look the same.

A tiger's stripes help the cat blend in among the patterns of shadows and light created by grasses and trees in the dense temperate and tropical forests of Asia where they live. The orange and brown or black stripes stand out to the human eye, but to a tiger's colorblind prey, orange appears green and blends in. The stripes are pigmented on their skin, too. Each tiger's stripe pattern is unique, Guglielmo said.

Lions' tawny coloring also serves as camouflage. Lions blend in with the dry grasses of Africa's open savannas.

On the inside, however, lions and tigers are very similar. "If you look at the skeletons, all cats essentially look the same," Z. Jack Tseng, an associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science. There's an unofficial saying among those who study cat fossils. If "you ask them to describe the cat family fossil record, usually people will say, 'Well, a cat is a cat is a cat,'" Tseng said. Even your pet cat is basically identical to a lion or tiger, skeletally speaking — just proportionally a lot smaller.

Evolutionary differences

Despite their similarities, "lions and tigers are not each other's closest relatives," Tseng said. Tigers are more closely related to snow leopards, while lions are grouped with leopards and jaguars.

Moreover, tigers emerged much earlier as a species than lions. "The oldest putative tiger fossils are around 2 million years old," Tseng said, "whereas lion fossils are probably no more than a million years old, probably younger than that."

When it comes to classifying cats, size matters. Lions and tigers belong to the Panthera genus, along with leopards, jaguars and snow leopards. The last common ancestor of all five species likely emerged at least 5.57 million years ago, a genetic modeling study found. Tseng and his co-authors modeled this age based on genetic sequences and anatomical data, such as characteristics of bones and teeth. No fossil has been found yet, but this ancestor was likely smaller than lions and tigers, Tseng said.

He noted that both species independently evolved to be large. Animals can grow in body size for a variety of reasons, including living in cooler climates, as this gives them a smaller surface area-to-volume ratio, which helps to reduce heat loss. "The fossil record is not detailed enough to say whether lions and tigers got large independently for the same reasons, but they probably followed one or more of these broader trends as they evolved," Tseng said.

Behavior

Lions and tigers behave quite differently in the wild. Lions live in social, matriarchal groups with multiple female relatives and one or two male adult lions who may leave if challenged by another male. That's where the mane can come in handy.

"Cats often go for the neck when they fight and when they kill their prey," Jacob Shanks, a wildlife care manager at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, told Live Science. "Male lions being social, there's a lot of battling for territory and access to reproduction and other resources, so the manes help protect against neck wounds."

Tigers have far less social interaction than lions do. Tiger cubs remain with their mother for two years before going their separate ways. As adults, tigers generally avoid each other, aside from breeding. When a tiger wants to approach another individual, it makes a puff-like sound, called a chuff, by pushing air through its nose. Tigers are "one of the only cat species that chuff," Guglielmo said. If the second tiger is OK with the first tiger moving closer, it will chuff back. "Lions don't use a chuff; they just use different body language or just walk up and see if it works," Guglielmo said.

Would tigers and lions ever meet in the wild? That's not likely, as they live in completely different parts of the world. Even in the fossil record, there is no overlap in their range, which prevents the two species from competing and breeding, Tseng said.

However, humans have artificially bred lions and tigers in captivity, creating a hybrid called a liger. "Hybridization doesn't exist in the wild," Shanks said. "I've never seen a case of wild lion-tiger hybridization." Making hybrids doesn't benefit either species, he added.

A key similarity between lions and tigers are the threats they face. Tigers are considered endangered, and lions are vulnerable, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Both big cats face threats from human conflict, habitat loss and climate change. "They need active conservation to protect and to help improve if we're going to not have them slip away," Shanks said.

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Most cat owners are familiar with the funny head shake their pets do, often after eating, drinking or enjoying a nice cheek scratch ​​‪—‬ they flick their head back and forth a mile a minute. Dogs and other mammals are known to show similar behaviors.

So why do our furry friends shake like this, and does it mean something is wrong?

Usually, this head shaking is totally normal, experts told Live Science. However, the reasons for it can vary a bit between cats and dogs.

Why cats shake their heads

Cats shake their heads when the nerve endings on their heads are stimulated, Sarah Crowley, an anthrozoologist at the University of Exeter in England, told Live Science.

"The physiological driver for it is stimulation of the very sensitive hairs and nerve endings around the top of the head, particularly around the ears," she said.

These nerve endings can be stimulated by a satisfying scratch, prompting the kitty to shake it off. "If a caregiver has touched a sensitive area" ‪—‬ for example, around the ears or whiskers — "this may result in a head shake," said Amy Miele, a clinical animal behavior lecturer at The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

This rapid swinging motion is very effective at dislodging obstructions, such as food or drink, from the cat's ears or whiskers. It can also help to resettle their fur, Crowley added.

"Often the head shake is followed by grooming of the face [or] ears," Miele told Live Science in an email.

The rapid head toss can also indicate annoyance. It's often a response to having their ear blown on — not something you should do on purpose, as they don't like it.

Thankfully, this erratic side-to-side motion doesn't usually cause dizziness. "Animals (including humans) are more likely to make themselves dizzy by spinning in circles," Miele said.

The full-body shake

Cats aren't the only animal with these silly shakes. "Lots of mammals have this head shake reflex to something in or around their ears," Crowley said. "You see mice and rats do it when they've been eating and drinking."

In dogs, breeds with upright ears, like German shepherds, are more likely to shake their heads than floppy-eared pups such as King Charles spaniels because it's easier to get something (like a grass seed or insect) stuck in an open ear.

Dog owners might recognize other types of shakes: the predatory shake (when your pooch tries to playfully "kill" its toys by whipping its head from side to side while its "prey" is in its mouth) and the full-body shake, sometimes called the "wet dog shake." "It starts at the head and then rolls down the whole body and ends at the tail," Crowley said. This is the kind of post-bath shake that soaks everything in your bathroom before you've had a chance to dry Fido with a fluffy towel.

The full-body shake can also indicate a transition between places or behavioral states ‪—‬ for example, if the pup just experienced something stressful or exciting. "This 'shake off' is a way of helping the animal to relieve tension and reset emotionally and physically," Miele said.

"It could be after quite an intense play session with another dog that was really fun," Crowley added. "You often see both dogs will finish playing, and then they'll both shake, and then they'll go do something else."

When to be concerned about your pet shaking its head

Although head shaking can be normal, if your pet starts doing it more often, in unusual circumstances, or while scratching or tilting their head, it might indicate a medical issue, such as an infection, parasite, irritation, neurological problem or something lodged in their ear.

"It's painful and uncomfortable, and that's the only thing that they can do, apart from stick their foot in it," Crowley said.

If you're concerned about your pet's head shaking, consult your vet. "If ear infections are left untreated, then this can result in hearing loss and risks the infection spreading beyond the tympanic membrane (ear drum) and into the middle ear, causing problems with balance and resulting in the animal becoming very unwell," Miele said.

For the most part, though, head shaking is just an adorably normal behavior that helps your pet stay clean and comfortable.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

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Aoshima is a tiny, 0.2-square-mile (0.5 square kilometers) Japanese island in the Seto Inland Sea that is home to around 80 feral cats and three elderly people. It is the best known of 11 "cat islands" in Japan where felines easily outnumber humans.

Due to a lack of economic opportunities and the island's aging human population, it's possible that Aoshima will be completely abandoned by people and inhabited only by cats within the next five years, although the cat population is also in decline.

A decade ago, there were about 200 cats on the island, but a mass spaying-and-neutering program in 2018 reduced the number of cats by more than half, and no kittens are known to have been born there since then. All of the remaining cats are older than 7, and a third have diseases caused by decades of inbreeding, according to The Guardian.

"We just take it one day at a time," Naoko Kamimoto, a resident of the island who is in her 70s and known locally as the "cat mama," told The Guardian in 2024. "But the day will come when there are no people left, and no cats. All we can do is make sure we look after them for as long as we're here."

Aoshima was settled in the 17th century and grew into a sardine fishing community with almost 900 inhabitants. Fishers brought a handful of cats to the island to kill rodents that were destroying fishing nets and increasingly becoming pests. But a decline in the fishing industry in the 20th century forced people to leave Aoshima and relocate to the mainland. Many left their cats behind, and the felines reproduced.

Aoshima's cats are fed by food donations from people around Japan. The felines also eat small animals on the island, but their impact on local wildlife is unclear.

The cats occupy abandoned houses and buildings that have crumbled over the years due to weather events such as typhoons and storms. Kamimoto looks after the cats, feeding them twice per day and administering medication.

"People see images online and think they're being neglected, but nothing could be further from the truth," she said. "Some are blind, some are really thin, and others look normal. But that's the reality for wild animals in a place like this."

A 2023 study analyzed the cats' genetic makeup and found significant differences in their coat-color genes compared with cats on other Japanese islands, explaining why most cats on Aoshima are ginger or tortoiseshell. The research showed that Aoshima's cats are descended from a small founder population, confirming that the felines are likely suffering from the effects of inbreeding.

If humans abandon the island, locals are confident that volunteers and shelters will adopt the cats, The Guardian reported. But for now, the felines are a tourist attraction, with visitors taking day trips to the island by boat and helping to feed the cats.

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Win-win interactions can be found across nature. These relationships, known as mutualisms, involve members of different species working together for a mutual benefit.

But relationships between two species can change over time, with those starting out as mutualistic potentially evolving into parasite-host relationships, Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, previously told Live Science.

In his book "The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us About How to Live Well With the Rest of Life" (Hachette Book Group, 2025), Dunn explores a common human-animal relationship that may force us to rethink mutualisms altogether: our relationship with cats. In this extract, Dunn looks at the origins of our connection to our feline friends, and why, on the face of it, cats could be considered "parasites of human societies, at least from a Darwinian perspective."

As we think about the ways we measure our mutualisms, it is worth considering cats. Domestic cats, house cats, under the table and on the table, cats are everywhere and we take them for granted, but what exactly do we get out of our partnership with them?

As far as I know, cats are no longer worshiped as gods. Yet they are also not our mutualists. Superficially they seem to be parasites of human societies, at least from a Darwinian perspective. They benefit from us at the cost of the food we provide to them. The collective weight of domestic cats exceeds that of African savannah elephants. And Americans alone give 15 billion calories' worth of food to house cats each day — much of it meat — roughly as many calories as would be consumed by humans in New York City in a day.

We feed them tuna; like royalty, they dine on the ocean's top predators. In exchange, what do we get back?

I concede in advance that I attempt to answer this question with trepidation. The conclusion I come to may require us to broaden our conception of what the terms of mutualism can be; they definitely require us to rethink what a cat is.

Today, hundreds of millions of house cats live with humans around the world. More than 70 million house cats can be found in the United States alone — 70 million meowing, purring, clawing beings — one cat for every four adult humans.

There have never before been so many felids [members of the cat family] on Earth. Globally, there are probably about half a billion cats, though no one has a great count. We have replaced nearly all the wild carnivorous felines of the world — tigers, lions, jaguars, and leopards — with domestic cats. Where once we feared jaguars, we are now confronted by beings we deign to give names like Edgar Allen Paw, Copurrnicus, and, all too often, Mr. Whiskers.

These household cats are all the descendants of the African or Libyan wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica. African wildcats are, and have long been, native to both North Africa and to the Levant. Their range bumps against that of European wildcats, Felis silvestris silvestris, in Turkey. As humans began to farm and store grain, African wildcats began to move into small agricultural human settlements. Once there, they ate mice and rats. They may also have eaten the snakes that ate those rodents (as highlighted in Egyptian art and, later, writing).

Studies led by the Italian cat geneticist Claudio Ottoni of the DNA present in the bones of cats found in archaeological sites have so far been unable to discover any evidence that the earliest African wildcats living with humans were genetically different from their wild-living ancestors and relatives. Their genes seem to have been nearly the same, or maybe simply the same.

At least early in cat-​human relationships, their bones were the same. The early village and city cats appear to have been the same African wildcat, simply living in closer proximity to humans. Species with this habit are sometimes called "synanthropes," which denotes nothing more than co‑occurrence, living with (syn) humans (anthrope). These cats living with humans had learned to act tame around humans, just as the humans had learned to act tame around them, most of the time.

"Tameness" is a vague word. Biologists use it to express a kind of mutual tolerance between a nonhuman animal species and humans. It comes from an ancient Indo-​European word meaning "to subdue." This root, though, is deceptive. Most tame species either have traits that lead them to behave tamely, as is the case in many island species long naive to large predators, or they choose to be tame, to walk into our worlds without menace. To be tame is to come in peace.

After walking into human cities, the partially or fully tame human-associated wildcats spread with agricultural societies. By 9,500 years ago, wildcats had arrived in places they could not get to without the help of humans. Wildcats are not native to Cyprus. Yet, they arrived. A 9,500-​year-​burial on the island of Cyprus includes an eight-​month-​old cat carefully prepared for the afterlife alongside a human. How? Ancient cats are unlikely to have engaged in long swims on their own (if you doubt this assertion, try to bathe a feral cat). Wild but tame cats were ushered/ferried/carried here and there by humans. It is likely that their human chauffeurs were scratched in the process.

In early settlements, cats and humans were friends with mutual benefits, regardless of whether either exerted any control over the other and whether either partner changed, evolutionarily, relative to the other. It was a mutualism at paw's length. The cats benefited from the messiness of humans and from the effects of that messiness on rodents. The humans benefited from the control cats could exert over rodent populations.

Today, most domesticated cats do not prey upon rats. But reports of early Egyptian cats suggest that they might have been larger than modern domestic cats. At least one Roman archaeological site in Egypt records a gluttonous cat with the bones of six rats in its stomach. In good years, the consumption of rodents, big and small, by cats might have been a kind of pleasantness for humans ("Ah, fewer mice"). In years when food was short, it likely saved lives. It also may have saved lives when diseases carried by rodents, or the fleas upon them, killed humans — diseases such as the plague. Later, cats also played a heightened role on ships, where mice and rats were gloriously abundant and where grain was a precious and relatively scarce commodity.

Where scholars of cat domestication — yes, there are a few, though they'd fit at a long dinner table — begin to differ is whether the predation of cats on mice, rats, and snakes continued to matter as human settlements grew ever larger. This is a subject that could be partially addressed through mathematical models.

I hypothesize that in small settlements in the ancient Levant, or, later, in Mesopotamia, cats were probably successful in reducing the abundance of mice, and maybe rats, and so, too, their negative effects. But in big urban centers, such as those that emerged with the New Kingdom period in Egypt (1600 BCE), grain was being stored in immense quantities. Where there were whole buildings full of grain, in cities practically spilling over with grain, it seems unlikely that one could keep enough cats around the grain for the cats to matter.

It would have taken hundreds or even thousands of cats milling around the granary, meowing and acting pissy. It is entirely possible, then, that as early grain-​based settlements grew, the functional role of cats in rodent and snake control decreased.

It is in this very period that cats began to appear in new forms in Egyptian art. By 3,500 years ago, cats were no longer shown hunting. Instead, they lurked under tables or chairs, often alongside powerful Egyptian women. As Claudio Ottoni pointed out to me, typically, these "under-​chair" cats were leashed, perhaps an indication that they may have been tame but not yet so docile as to pose unrestrained for an artist. The under-​chair cats seem to indicate that as the human-cat relationship persisted, new kinds of bonds were forming, bonds that no longer related simply to the role of cats in controlling pests. But why?

Tigers will soon roam Kazakhstan for the first time in over 70 years as conservationists undertake a gargantuan effort to restore part of their lost habitat.

The last of Kazakhstan's Caspian tigers disappeared in the late 1940s, after years of hunting, habitat loss and declines in prey numbers. Now, the Central Asian country has an ambitious plan to reintroduce the world's largest cats to their historic lands.

So far, two captive tigers (a male and a female) are already in Kazakhstan as part of a breeding-and-release project, while the country is expecting its first wild tigers to be transported from Russia in the first half of 2026. However, for the program to be a success, the tigers need plenty of places to live. That's where an enormous tree-planting project comes in.

Last year, the Kazakhstan tiger reintroduction program — led by the government of Kazakhstan with support from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the United Nations Development Programme — planted 37,000 seedlings and cuttings near a giant lake in southeast Kazakhstan's South Balkhash region, where tigers used to live, according to WWF Central Asia. This adds to the 50,000 seedlings planted between 2021 to 2024.

Tree planting is a key part of Kazakhstan's massive ongoing greening initiative. The country has planted around 1.4 billion trees since 2021, and officials say they are on track to reach 2 billion trees by 2027.

In South Balkhash, newly planted trees serve as a foundation for recovering ecosystems that sit alongside already-forested lands. The trees provide shelter and water access, as well as food for the tiger's prey: hooved mammals (ungulates) like boar and Bukhara deer (Cervus elaphus bactrianus, also called Bactrian deer).

"Already, wild ungulates have been seen foraging on the restored sites, indicating that the ecosystem is beginning to function," a spokesperson for WWF Central Asia told Live Science in an email. "Each planted seedling is therefore a direct contribution to the future of the tiger in Kazakhstan."

The planting zone encompasses around 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of shoreline along Lake Balkhash, which covers roughly 6,500 square miles (17,000 square km) and is the largest lake in Central Asia and the 15th-largest lake in the world. The new vegetation — which includes 30,000 narrow-leaf oleaster seedlings, 5,000 willow cuttings and 2,000 turanga poplar seedlings — creates growing "islands" of forest that regulate the flow of water to stabilize floods and overflows.

WWF Central Asia attributes the increase in planting in 2025 to the accumulated experience of the staff, as well as to factors like improved planting techniques and expanded partnerships. However, the pace of the ecosystem's recovery and its suitability for tigers will depend on a variety of factors, including the climate, stability of water resources, and growth of vegetation.

Bringing back tigers

The tigers that used to live in Kazakhstan were part of a now-extinct Central Asian population known as Caspian tigers. However, the living Amur tigers found in the Russian Far East and China (and potentially North Korea) can serve as suitable replacements. A 2009 study published in the journal PLOS One found that Caspian and Amur tigers were likely part of the same population until human activity forced them apart in the 19th century, meaning they're essentially the same animal.

The reintroduction program welcomed two captive Amur tigers in 2024, and they appear to have adapted well to life in Kazakhstan. These tigers, a female named Bodhana and a male named Kuma, came from an animal sanctuary in the Netherlands in 2024 and are currently living in an enclosure within the Ile-Balkhash Nature Reserve. Bodhana and Kuma are used to life in captivity, so they'll never be released, but the hope is that their offspring will form part of a new founder population of Kazakhstan tigers.

However, as there's no guarantee that Bodhana and Kuma will breed or produce suitable offspring, so the bulk of the new population will be made up of wild tigers imported from Russia.

Kazakhstan officials are expecting to receive the first tigers from Russia in the coming months. WWF Central Asia told Live Science that it hasn't been confirmed where the Russian tigers are coming from, but "based on publicly available information and recent media reports, it is understood that the Amur tigers expected in the first half of 2026 are from the wild."

Reintroducing large predators is a delicate and risky process, particularly when those predators are capable of harming humans and livestock. But it can be done; a 2024 study published in The Journal of Wildlife Management found that a tiger reintroduction attempt in Russia was largely a success. Researchers cared for six orphaned wild cubs and prepared them for re-release into their natural habitat. The tigers caught their own prey and survived.

However, the study noted that one rehabilitated tiger killed multiple domestic animals, including more than 13 goats in a single event, and failed to demonstrate adequate fear of humans. That tiger was subsequently recaptured and placed in a zoo.

WWF Central Asia said Kazakhstan's program is prepared to resolve any incidents that involve human conflict with its released tigers. Measures include creating a special team that will continuously track released individuals and respond to any potential human-wildlife conflicts.

"The group's main tasks include regular patrols, monitoring tiger movements via satellite collars, early detection of potential approaches to settlements, and rapid response measures," the WWF Central Asia spokesperson said.

The program is also working with local communities to raise awareness about tigers and how to behave in their presence, as well as promoting sustainable development in those communities by offering grants for agriculture and ecotourism, according to WWF Central Asia.

"All of this forms part of a long-term strategy for peaceful coexistence between people and predators," the spokesperson said. "A compensation scheme for local residents is also planned in cases where tigers cause livestock losses."

Scientists have successfully extracted the DNA of ancient mummified cheetahs discovered in a cave in Saudi Arabia. This is the first time scientists have been able to extract genetic information from ancient naturally mummified big cats, researchers say, and it could lead to the animals' reintroduction to the region.

In 2022 and 2023, researchers discovered seven desiccated cheetahs and the skeletal remains of 54 others in the Lauga cave network the Arar area of northern Saudi Arabia. The remains date to between 100 and 4,000 years ago.

In a new study, published Thursday (Jan. 15) in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, scientists analyzed genetic data from the big cats and found that the older ones are most closely related to modern-day cheetahs in western Africa rather than Asian cheetahs.

Cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) are under threat globally. Populations have plummeted, and there are now only about 7,100 cheetahs left. The big cat, which is the world's fastest land mammal, once roamed through most of Africa and in Asia from the Arabian peninsula to India, but it now lives in about 9% of its historic range.

Today, there are five recognized sub-species of cheetah, four of which are in Africa and one (A. j. venaticus) in Asia. This Asian population is restricted to a small group of cheetahs in Iran.

No one is sure how many cheetahs once roamed in the Arabian peninsula, or how widely they were distributed. Similarly, there is little evidence about why or when they disappeared. Scholars speculate that it was a mixture of habitat loss and fragmentation, hunting and human-wildlife conflict.

However, the discovery of the hoard of ancient cheetah remains — which includes cubs and adults — proves that they once did roam the region — and could offer a blueprint for their return.

"The research provides strong evidence for the historical presence of cheetahs in Saudi Arabia and supports the potential for rewilding in this region to help expand their current range and restore part of their former distribution," Desire Dalton, a forensic scientist at Teesside University in the U.K., who studies the use of genomic tools to inform conservation and was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

In the study, researchers dated samples from two of the mummified cheetahs and five of the skeletons. The oldest skeletal remains belong to a cheetah that died about 4,000 years ago, while the two desiccated cheetahs are 130 and 1,870 years old respectively.

The team found evidence that prehistoric cheetahs in Saudi Arabia are genomically the closest to the West African A. j. hecki subspecies. Only the youngest specimen analyzed had closer links to the Asian subspecies A. j. Venaticus.

"Using advanced archaeological, radiological and genomic technique, the authors have established that the mummified cheetahs have two lineages," Kumarasamy Thangaraj, a forensic geneticist at the CSIR Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

Dalton said that the identification of these unique lineages suggests that cheetah diversity loss may have been greater than scientists previously thought.

But the research gives conservationists a starting point to potentially reintroduce cheetahs to Saudi Arabia. The authors argue that cheetahs for rewilding in the Arabian peninsula can be sourced from the closest subspecies of the discovered cheetahs — A. j. Hecki — which is much more abundant than the Asian subspecies.

The DNA discovery could prove useful for ongoing rewilding efforts. In 2023, Saudi Arabia launched a program to reintroduce the Arabian cheetah. A year later, its National Center for Wildlife reported the birth of four cheetah cubs and the launch of its National Cheetah Conservation Strategy, which includes the creation of specialized breeding facilities, and the establishment of a wild breeding population.

The idea of using ancient DNA to reintroduce animals is not far-fetched, Dalton said. "Genetic studies have guided several successful rewilding projects." For example, genetic data for European bison (Bison bonasus) have informed breeding and translocation strategies for these animals. This reduced the risk of animals struggling to adapt to their new environment, she said. There is also a project underway to conduct ancient DNA analysis of European wolves (Canis lupus lupus) to develop targeted management strategies to preserve the biodiversity of European wolves, she said.

The study authors think that caves around the world could yield more secrets about ancient species. Caves in arid environments, such as Saudi Arabia, can generate hot, dry microclimates that are ideal for drying out animal remains, which can lead to mummification.

"The arid cave environments of Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, may yet hold further important insights that can inform ecological histories, evolutionary insight, and actionable intelligence for rewilding and conservation," the authors wrote.

Of the more than 600 million cats across the globe, less than 10% belong to a specific breed. But are these purebred cats the result of human intervention, or did some develop naturally?

The answer is more complicated than it might seem. According to Leslie A. Lyons, a cat geneticist at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine, most cat breeds developed in the past 140 years as a result of human selection for specific physical traits.

However, a select few are known as "natural" cat breeds because they are derived from a population of cats that evolved due to factors in their natural environments over thousands of years. These natural cat breeds include some of the most beloved breeds today, such as Maine coons, Siberians, Russian blues, Norwegian forest cats, Turkish Vans and Egyptian maus.

According to Sarah Hartwell, a cat genetics hobbyist and founder of the cat resource MessyBeast, the progenitors of natural breeds form under the same conditions as wild species do.

"Natural breeds could be considered a step along the road to speciation," she told Live Science. In most cases, they form as a result of environmental adaptation. In Western Russia, cold and snowy conditions favored thick-furred, big-boned cats that became the foundation of the Siberian forest cat breed. In Southeast Asia and the coastal areas of the Indian Ocean, warm and humid conditions favored short-haired, slender-bodied, big-eared cats that set the stage for the Abyssinian.

In some cases, natural breeds begin as a result of geographic isolation. This phenomenon, known as the founder effect, occurs when a gene that is not advantageous to the animals' survival spreads because the population has a small, isolated gene pool. On the Isle of Man (a self-governing British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea), a mutation that caused a short tail spread as a result of inbreeding, resulting in the ancestors of the Manx cat. Unfortunately, Manx cats can suffer from spinal defects due to this tail mutation.

Although the ancestors of natural breeds evolved under natural conditions, modern-day cats of these breeds are not so "natural" anymore.

"All breeds, no matter what species, have human influence," Lyons told Live Science. According to a study in the journal Animal Genetics that she co-authored, the selective breeding of cats has increased exponentially in the past century, which, in turn, has removed the environmental pressures that shaped natural breeds.

The Manx breed, for example, likely would have died out naturally due to a lack of genetic diversity and the detrimental effects of the short-tail mutation. In the modern day, the breed is still widespread as a result of intentional breeding by humans. However, there are some who are trying to eliminate it.

"The thought is to retire this breed, or find a way to make them healthier," Lyons told Live Science. "Maybe we [work toward] a tailed Manx."

Some of the once-natural breeds are more closely connected to their roots than others are. Modern Siberian cats, for example, are genetically and physically similar to their ancestors because breeders regularly bring in new cats, found as strays or as pets in the breed's home region, to add to breeding programs.

Other breeds have been altered both genetically and physically from their original appearance. Russian blues, for example, were crossbred with Siamese cats to prevent the breed's extinction after World War II, and breeders have since divided them into specific "types" that look different from the original cats.

So yes, "natural" cat breeds do exist, but they are not entirely natural. The traits that are quintessential of a Maine coon purchased from a breeder — such as large size, square jaw, and often feet with six or more toes — may resemble the Maine coons discovered back in the 1800s, but they have been preserved — and, in some cases, exaggerated — through artificial selection.

"It all depends on popularity and what people prefer," Lyons told Live Science. "One lineage of cats might become very popular and change what the breed looks like, and then it might swing back another direction depending on the next new craze."

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

Over 10,000 years of domestication, cats have learned to meow to get exactly what they want from their human servants. Now, researchers in Turkey have found that cats greet men far more vocally than they do women — and this could be another way they manipulate us to get the attention they deserve.

The new research reveals "cats' ability to categorize bonded individuals and modulate their responses," said study co-author Kaan Kerman, principal investigator of the Animal Behavior and Human-animal Interactions Research Group at Bilkent University in Turkey. "This shows that cats are not automata and possess cognitive abilities that enable them to live alongside humans in an adaptive manner," he told Live Science in an email.

Despite their reputation for being aloof and unfriendly, cats are actually highly communicative and masters at fitting into different social groups.

"Both the public imagination and the scientific community for a time viewed cats as loners with little need for social bonds," Kerman said. However, "cats are more social than previously assumed. They do not interact with humans solely to obtain food. They actively seek social contact and form bonds with their caregivers."

Greeting is a key part of that sociability, as it helps reinforce bonds between domestic cats (Felis catus) and their humans, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Nov. 14 in the journal Ethology.

To find out more about how cats greet humans, the researchers fitted 40 cat owners with cameras. They were asked to film the first 100 seconds of their interactions with their cat after returning home. The participants were told to act normally so they could capture typical interactions. The researchers then analyzed the footage to assess whether certain behaviors are related, and whether different demographic variables influenced the cats' behaviors.

Nine people were excluded from the study for various reasons, but videos from the remaining 31 participants revealed that the cats were far more vocal toward men than women when their humans first walked in. "No other demographic factor had a discernible effect on the frequency or duration of greetings," the researchers wrote.

The researchers then accounted for different factors, such as the animals' sex, pedigree status and number of cats in the household — but found that the sex of the human was the only significant influence on cat vocalizations.

The researchers suggest this could be because women are typically more verbally active with their cats and better at interpreting what their cats want. Men, on the other hand, may need a lot more prompting before they pay sufficient attention to their cats, the researchers hypothesized in the study.

The team also speculate that cultural factors may have influenced their findings. Previous research shows that people in different cultures interact with cats in different ways — and that this also impacts how cats interact with humans. In this case, the participants were in Turkey, and it may be that men in Turkey are less likely to be chatty with their cats, the team wrote. "However, this interpretation remains speculative and warrants further exploration in future research," the team wrote.

The team also found that meowing and other vocalizations didn't fit into a specific pattern of behavior — meaning these vocalizations were not a sign of a specific emotional state or need.

The team acknowledged that the study has several limitations, including the small sample size and the participants being from the same region. The researchers also noted that the study did not control for other potentially important factors, such as how hungry the cats were when their humans returned, the number of other people in the household or the length of time the animals were alone. Previous research suggested that cats react differently to humans — such as by purring and stretching more — when they are separated for longer periods of time, so the results don't necessarily reveal that cats always meow more at men.

"One important next step is to replicate the findings in different cultural contexts. This would help us understand how generalizable the results are," Kerman said.

Dennis Turner, director of the Institute for Applied Ethology and Animal Psychology in Switzerland who was not involved in the study, said he was impressed by the team's findings.

"I liked the authors' speculation about the reason for this finding and suspect that the men either were less attentive to the cats' vocalizations on other occasions or reacted differently (more or less strongly, different voice frequency) to the greeting vocalizations than women," he told Live Science in an email.

"Much of my team's research [h]as shown that men and women (and children) interact differently with cats in the household." For instance, women speak more to cats and are likelier to go down to the cats' level to interact with them, he noted.

However, cats likely have no preference towards men or women, Turner added. Instead, he agreed with the researchers' view that more meowing toward men is a sign of cats' social flexibility.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

Humans were living alongside leopard cats in settlements in ancient China more than 3,500 years before domestic cats arrived, new research shows.

The findings reveal that people in the region had an enduring and complex relationship with such animals for thousands of years before domestic cats arrived with merchants along the Silk Road 1,400 years ago.

"Now, they [leopard cats] are our hidden neighbors, but thousands of years ago they lived in a closer relationship with people," study co-author Shu-Jin Luo, principal investigator at Peking University's School of Life Sciences in Beijing, China, told Live Science.

The work was published Thursday (Nov. 27) in the journal Cell Genomics.

Modern domestic cats (Felis catus), which are descended from African wildcats (Felis lybica), have adapted so successfully to living with humans that they are now found on every continent except for Antarctica.

Yet when and where they were originally domesticated is uncertain, with researchers previously suggesting the Levant 9,500 years ago and Egypt about 3,500 years ago. One of the main hypotheses is that they spread to Europe with Neolithic farmers about 2,500 years ago and then were eventually taken along the Silk Road through Eurasia into China.

However, in 2013, evidence of cats living alongside humans in western China thousands of years before that, in about 3300 B.C., came to light, casting doubt on that idea.

In 2022, analysis of the cat DNA revealed that these ancient cats in China weren't domestic cats but were leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis), a small wild cat native to South, Southeast and East Asia.

Rather than clearing everything up, the result led to more questions: how long the leopard cats had lived alongside humans, when and how domestic cats reached China, and what drama played out when the domestic cats turned up and found that they weren't the only felid in town.

To find out more, researchers behind the new study used radiocarbon dating and DNA sequencing of nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from samples of 22 ancient felid bones, which were unearthed in 14 archaeological sites across China dating from about 3500 B.C. to A.D. 1800. The scientists then compared their results with previously published ancient and modern cat genomes from around the world.

Of the 22 individuals, 14, dated to between about A.D. 730 and 1800, were domestic cats. The earliest domestic cat was excavated from Tongwan City, a key hub along the Silk Road in western China. Previous research identified another domestic cat farther west along the Silk Road in Kazakhstan, dated to between A.D. 775 and 940.

The earliest known depictions of domestic cats in China are painted motifs in two tombs in central China dating to about A.D. 820 and 830, and there is also a written account from about the same time of the empress presenting a pet cat to her ministers.

These records hint that domestic cats arrived in China via the Silk Road relatively recently, in about A.D. 700, and as a recent introduction were thought of as exotic pets and likely kept among the ancient Chinese elite, Luo told Live Science. The cats were often white, which was considered a sacred color in animals, she said.

All the earlier remains belonged to leopard cats, dating from between about 5,400 years ago to approximately A.D. 150.

When the researchers studied the cats, they realized that the close relationship between humans and leopard cats was not a transient and occasional thing but instead a shared history lasting for over 3,500 years, Luo said.

She added that leopard cats in ancient China may have once occupied a similar niche to domestic cats, entering a commensal relationship with humans by preying on small rodents in villages and fields.

"I think in ancient times, people would keep the cub and try to raise it so they can catch rodents. I don't think it's ever been fully domesticated, but it was definitely a more intimate relationship than with today's leopard cat," Luo said.

Eva-Maria Geigl, a paleogeneticist at the Jacques Monod Institute of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science the findings reflect the domestication process of cats around the Mediterranean. "It's a commensal relationship, taking advantage of the human niche and this was very welcomed by the Neolithic farmers as they really had to struggle with the rodents and with venomous animals," she told Live Science. "Such cats were not domesticated in the sense as we see it now — these couch potatoes — they were real wild cats still."

Records compiled between the fifth and third centuries B.C in China provide further evidence of this relationship, Luo said, indicating that people welcomed wild cats on their farms for pest control. This means leopard cats may have had a relationship with humans that lasted approximately 3,500 years, she said.

However, this relationship eventually ended, and there is a nearly 600-year gap between the last uncovered leopard cats and the earliest appearance of domestic cats in China.

Luo said this lack of cats coincides with the Period of Division (A.D. 220 to 589) after the collapse of the Han dynasty and before the rise of the Tang dynasty. It was a time of war and colder, drier conditions with declining agricultural yields, social unrest and a shrinking population. A similar temporary population decline was seen in black rats (Rattus rattus) in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.

This means the leopard cats likely lost their hunting grounds, Luo said. When the Tang dynasty was established in A.D. 618, and agriculture and the human population rebounded, the leopard cats were no longer so welcome, because of the rise of keeping chickens.

Leopard cats still have a bad reputation for killing chickens, she said, so the cats would have become unwelcome animals. In southern parts of China, the leopard cat has the nickname the "chicken-killing tiger," Luo said.

Domestic cats took their place because they are cute, tame and generally catch smaller prey like mice and rats, not chickens, Luo suggested.

Geigl said the crucial shift that led domestic cats to gain widespread acceptance probably came in Egypt in the first millennium B.C., when people bred cats in temples and fed many cats together, and a genetic mutation led to behavioral change. "This is not normal behavior for a cat. A cat is a territorial solitary animal, just the opposite of what the Egyptians had," she noted.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

If you've ever seen a litter of kittens, you may know that many of them barely look related. With coats ranging from black to white, tortoiseshell to tabby, and even long-haired to short-haired, littermates can look quite different from each other.

So why do kittens often not resemble their close relations, whereas most human siblings look similar to each other? The answer comes down to the complicated nature of cat coat genetics and a phenomenon in cat ovulation.

The genetics of cat coat color

The Cat Fanciers' Association recognizes dozens of coat colors and patterns, including everything from basic solid colors to more distinctive patterns, like the Bengal's rosetted tabby coat or the Abyssinian's ticked fur. All of those variations stem from a complex system of interacting genes.

"There are a number of different genes involved in cat color and pattern, and it's particularly complicated because some genes overwrite other genes," Jonathan Losos, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023), told Live Science.

Different genes control solid coat colors, spotting, patterns and hair length. According to Losos, these genes come in a "hierarchy" — for example, one gene mutation for white fur, called dominant white, will override any other colors. Other genes control patterns such as tabby fur, and these work in combination with genes for color to produce a coat. Some cat coat colors are also sex-linked, meaning the gene is contained on the X chromosome, so the range of colors and patterns for male and female cats is different. In general, only female cats have calico or tortoiseshell patterns.

If all of these gene variations are hard to keep track of, that's the point. Even a few different combinations of a handful of genes can have drastically different outcomes for coat color, pattern and length, and that's one big reason cat littermates can look so different even when they have most of the same genes. But there's another factor that makes the genetics of cat litters even more complicated.

Multiple paternity

Female cats are induced ovulators, which means their reproductive system doesn't release eggs until they've already mated with a male. This increases the chance of successful fertilization, but it also comes with a catch: The female can release multiple eggs during this time, so if she mates with another tomcat in the next few days, she can become pregnant by multiple males.

That means kittens in the same litter can have more than one father, so some siblings are only 25% genetically related to each other, leaving a lot more room for variation in their appearance. This phenomenon is called heteropaternal superfecundation, and it's actually not that rare in the animal kingdom; dogs, sheep and cows can also have multiple births with more than one father. In extremely rare cases, heteropaternal superfecundation has even been documented in humans.

"I don't think it's unusual that cats do this," Losos said.

Scientists don't know exactly why heteropaternal superfecundation is so common in cats, but there are theories.

For one, induced ovulation could be a more resourceful way to go about mating, and heteropaternal superfecundation is a side effect of induced ovulation. "It might be an evolutionary adaptation that allows the mating process to be more efficient," Bruce Kornreich, director of the Cornell Feline Health Center, told Live Science. He explained that releasing eggs only after mating prevents eggs from being "wasted" so that the female cat's reproductive system doesn't use energy on unneeded eggs.

Multiple paternity within a litter could even have its own advantages, Losos noted. When littermates have different fathers, it increases the genetic diversity of cat families, which is generally good for survival.

Heteropaternal superfecundation is much more likely to occur in urban areas, where the concentration of cats is high and tomcat territories are likely to overlap. In fact, one 1999 study found that 70% to 83% of urban cat litters had more than one father, whereas only zero to 22% of rural litters had more than one father, making diverse litters the norm rather than the exception.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

Scientists have discovered a new type of lion roar — the intermediate roar — which is shorter and lower-pitched than the animal's iconic, full-throated roar.

The researchers found that these intermediate roars always follow full-throated roars. The discovery reveals that lion vocalizations are more complex than previously thought, said study lead author Jonathan Growcott, a doctoral student in mathematics and statistics at the University of Exeter in the U.K.

"The full-throated roar is an explosion of sound. Loud and complex and arcs in pitch," Growcott told Live Science in an email. "The intermediary roar differs by being a flatter sound with less variation."

The discovery, published Friday (Nov. 21) in the journal Ecology and Evolution, challenges the long-held belief that there is only one kind of lion roar, and it could help researchers estimate lion population sizes more accurately, he said.

Lions roar to communicate with their pride and establish their territory. Previous research has indicated that lions' full-throated roars are unique, individually identifiable signatures that contain information about an animal's sex, age and other characteristics. This suggests sound recordings can help scientists count the number of lions in a landscape and thus make population density estimates, Growcott said.

For the study, the researchers deployed 50 custom-built microphones in Tanzania's Nyerere National Park and attached acoustic sensors to collars on five lions in Zimbabwe's Bubye Valley Conservancy area. In total, the team recorded 3,149 African lion (Panthera leo) vocalizations.

The team then used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the sounds, which revealed the intermediate roar.

Without AI, understanding full-throated roars and identifying lions based on their vocalizations has always been subjective, Growcott said. Lions also make other sounds — including grunts, snarls, chuffs, moans and mews — but only full-throated roars have been shown to hold identifiable signatures, so it is important to identify these roars correctly and extract as much information as possible from them.

The researchers' AI model enabled them to classify lion vocalization types with over 95% accuracy, largely removing the bias that is introduced when researchers try to characterize lion calls manually. This approach also made it easier to identify individual lions based on their full-throated roars, and highlighted the previously unknown intermediate roar — knowledge of which will help researchers to isolate full-throated roars in the future.

"This new method which proves that intermediary roars exist and are different to the full-throated roar is an important first step for ensuring consistency in selecting full-throated roars," Growcott said.

There are only about 23,000 African lions left in the wild, making the species vulnerable to extinction, according to the IUCN Red List. Traditional methods to estimate lion population sizes include camera traps and spoor surveys, but these require large resources and may be less accurate than acoustic surveys.

"I hope that using data-driven predicted full-throated roars will lead to more accurate acoustic population density estimates which can better inform the pressing needs of conservation," Growcott said.

Big cats quiz: Can you get the lion's share of these questions right?

While often miscast as mysterious or hard to understand, cats are actually excellent communicators. In fact, in free-ranging cat colonies, physical fights are kept to a minimum through clever use of body posturing, scent exchange and vocalisations.

Cats have also adapted their communication for humans. For instance, adult cats don't usually meow at each other. But when around people, cats meow a lot, suggesting they have adapted this vocalisation for communicating with humans.

And it's not just the meow. Cats have a wide vocal repertoire for conveying different meanings, even for specific people. Bonded cats and humans often develop their own communication repertoires, similar to having a unique dialect.

Cats can understand human communication too. Studies show cats know their own names and the names of their companions, and can recognise human emotions, even changing their own behaviour in response.

Despite all this, humans still routinely misunderstand cats. Our new study, published in Frontiers in Ethology, shows just how little people understand the cues cats give. Try the quiz below to see how well you speak cat.

What we did

We asked 368 Australian participants to watch videos of human — cat play interactions. But not all the videos were "play" for the cat. Only half of the cats were playing, while the other half were actually showing signs they didn't want to play, or were feeling stressed by the interaction.

After each video, participants were asked if they thought the interaction was overall positive or negative for the cat, based only on the cat's behaviour. They were then asked how they would interact with the cat in the video they had just seen.

How well do you speak cat?

Watch the short videos below and decide: is the cat feeling positive or negative about the interaction? Remember to base your answers only on the cat's behavior.

What did our study find?

Results showed that participants struggled to recognize negative cues indicating discomfort or stress in cats.

For videos of cats who weren't playing and were showing subtle negative cues (such as sudden tension in the body or avoiding touch), participants only recognized the negative cues about as well as chance (48.7%).

Even when participants watched videos of cats showing overt negative cues like hissing, biting or trying to escape, they still incorrectly categorised these as positive 25% of the time.

Recognizing when a cat is stressed is only the first step. We also need to know how to respond to these cues.

Even when participants did successfully recognize negative cues, they often chose to engage with the cat in ways that would cause more stress and increase the risk of human injury, such as stroking, belly rubbing and playing with hands.

Stress is unhealthy

Stress can have serious consequences. Cats who experience regular or prolonged stress (including from unwanted interactions like those in the negative videos) are at higher risk of heath issues such as bladder inflamation.

They're also more likely to develop behaviours people find problematic, such as increased aggression or urinating outside of the litter tray. In turn, these behaviors increase risk of the cat being euthanised or rehomed.

Cat stress is bad for humans, too. If a person doesn't heed early warning signs, the cat may bite or scratch, depositing bacteria and microorganisms deep into the skin. Rapid infection follows 30% – 50% of cat bites. If not treated promptly, it can lead to serious complications including sepsis, chronic health issues and even death. Cat bites and scratches can also transmit zoonotic diseases such as cat scratch disease.

How to play safely with cats

Watch for early warning signs a cat isn't enjoying themselves and stop if you notice any. By the time cues are obvious, cats are already experiencing distress.

Early warnings include turning away, dodging or blocking attempts to touch, flinching, body tension, ears back or to the side, lip/nose licking and tail thrashing, slapping or tucking.

Touch

Avoid sensitive areas such as the belly, paws or the base of the tail. Cats prefer to be touched on the head and neck.

Avoid using hands to play. It teaches cats that hands are toys, and increases the risk of accidental injury. Instead, use toys that keep your face and hands away, such as a wand toy with a long handle.

Tail

Tail movements aren't always a negative sign — they just mean the cat is emotionally stimulated and that could be from stress or excitement. Cats also use their tails for balance. So it's best to consider the tail in combination with the whole body and the context.

Changes in tail movements can also give important clues to the cat's mood. Generally, the bigger the movement, the more intense the feeling. So, if the movements start to get bigger or faster during play, or if a tail goes from relaxed to swishing when you touch, that might be a sign to back off.

Ears

Cats' ears are like antennas that swivel and adjust to pinpoint sound, but they can also give us a clue to how they are feeling. If the ears move for a moment and then return to a relaxed position, that usually means they're listening to the world around them. If the ears remain flattened and back, that's a sign of distress.

Vocalisations

Trilling and chirruping both suggest a playful cat, while hissing, growling and yowling all indicate stress. Purring might seem positive but may indicate a cat is stressed and trying to self soothe.

Let them be

When early warnings don't work, cats may show overt signs such as hissing, growling, trembling, hiding and, ultimately, biting or scratching.

If you notice warning signs, give the cat plenty of space. When stressed, cats don't like being touched or having people too close. If the cat comes back and re-initiates contact, that's a good sign they're comfortable, but keep watch for warning signs returning.

If you pay attention to your cat's behavior and give them space when they need it, with a bit of practice you might just become fluent in cat.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Asian golden cat, also known as the Asiatic golden cat or Temminck's cat, is a feline endemic to some of Asia's densest forests. It comes in a wide palette of colors, plucks birds before eating them and — despite weighing no more than 35 pounds (16 kilograms), or two to three times as much as a domestic cat — is bold enough to kill prey such as buffalo calves, small muntjacs and baby deer.

Asian golden cats are elusive creatures rarely seen in the wild. Camera trap images indicate that the most common coat colors for the species are golden-brown and reddish-brown, but gray, melanistic, pale cinnamon and patterned, ocelot-like forms also exist, explaining why the species is sometimes described as a "feline of many costumes." According to the International Society for Endangered Cats (ISEC), there is no known link between coat color and the geographic distribution of Asian golden cats.

Although it prefers to hunt on the ground, the Asian golden cat can also climb trees. It kills larger prey with a strong bite to the neck, prowling sub-tropical and tropical forests at various times of day. While researchers long thought that Asian golden cats are nocturnal, more recent evidence suggests these cats have irregular activity patterns that may peak at twilight.

The species can live up to 20 years and at altitudes ranging from sea level to 14,050 feet (4,282 meters), according to a 2016 biodiversity survey in Bhutan. This survey and others showing Asian golden cats living at very high elevations suggest highlands may be important habitat for the species.

Asian golden cats have also been spotted in open areas with rocky tracts, and they are even known as "rock cats" in parts of China, according to the ISEC. Their ranges are about 20% larger than those of the clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), despite the two species exhibiting similar behaviors and overlapping in their distribution.

But as a result of their preference for forest habitats, Asian golden cats are especially vulnerable to deforestation, which has caused a huge loss of habitat for the species. Southeast Asian forests have some of the highest deforestation rates in the world due to the expansion of crops like oil palm, coffee and rubber, according to the ISEC.

Asian golden cats are also threatened by illegal hunting for their pelts and bones, which are used in traditional medicine, and for their meat, which is considered a delicacy in some regions, according to the ISEC. Where Asian golden cats come into contact with livestock such as sheep and goats, the predators sometimes kill farmers' animals, leading to retribution killings, the society says.

Cats may have a reputation for independence, but emerging research suggests we share a unique connection with them — fueled by brain chemistry.

The main chemical involved is oxytocin, often called the love hormone. It's the same neurochemical that surges when a mother cradles her baby or when friends hug, fostering trust and affection. And now studies are showing oxytocin is important for cat-human bonding too.

Oxytocin plays a central role in social bonding, trust and stress regulation in many animals, including humans. One 2005 experiment showed that oxytocin made human volunteers significantly more willing to trust others in financial games.

Oxytocin also has calming effects in humans and animals, as it suppresses the stress hormone cortisol and activates the parasympathetic nervous system (the rest and digest system) to help the body relax.

Scientists have long known that friendly interactions trigger oxytocin release in both dogs and their owners, creating a mutual feedback loop of bonding. Until recently, though, not much was known about its effect in cats.

Cats are more subtle in showing affection. Yet their owners often report the same warm feelings of companionship and stress relief that dog owners do — and studies are increasingly backing these reports up. Researchers in Japan, for example, reported in 2021 that brief petting sessions with their cats boosted oxytocin levels in many owners.

In that study, women interacted with their cats for a few minutes while scientists measured the owners' hormone levels. The results suggested that friendly contact (stroking the cat, talking in a gentle tone) was linked to elevated oxytocin in the humans' saliva, compared with a quiet resting period without their cat.

Many people find petting a purring cat is soothing, and research indicates it's not just because of the soft fur. The act of petting and even the sound of purring can trigger oxytocin release in our brains. One 2002 study found this oxytocin rush from gentle cat contact helps lower cortisol (our stress hormone), which in turn can reduce blood pressure and even pain.

When is oxytocin released between cats and humans?

Research is pinpointing specific moments that cause the release of this hormone in our cross-species friendship. Gentle physical contact seems to be a prime trigger for cats.

A February 2025 study found that when owners engaged in relaxed petting, cuddling or cradling of their cats, the owners' oxytocin tended to rise, and so did the cats' — if the interaction was not forced on the animal.

The researchers monitored oxytocin in cats during 15 minutes of play and cuddling at home with their owner. Securely attached cats who initiated contact such as lap-sitting or nudging showed an oxytocin surge. The more time they spent close to their humans, the greater the boost.

What about less-cuddly felines? The same study noted different patterns in cats with more anxious or aloof attachment styles. Avoidant cats (those who kept their distance) showed no significant oxytocin change, while cats who were anxious (constantly seeking their owner but easily overwhelmed by handling) had high oxytocin to begin with.

Oxytocin of avoidant and anxious cats was found to drop after a forced cuddle. When interactions respect the cat's comfort, the oxytocin flows — but when a cat feels cornered, the bonding hormone is elusive.

Maybe humans could learn something from their feline friends on managing attachment styles. The key to bonding with a cat is understanding how they communicate.

Unlike dogs, cats don't rely on prolonged eye contact to bond. Instead, they use more understated signals. The most well known is the slow blink. It's a feline smile, signaling safety and trust.

Purring also plays a role in bonding with people. The low-frequency rumble of a cat's purr has been linked not only to healing in cats themselves, but also to calming effects in humans. Listening to purring can lower heart rate and blood pressure; oxytocin mediates these benefits.

The companionship of a cat, reinforced by all those little oxytocin boosts from daily interactions, can serve as a buffer against anxiety and depression — in some cases providing comfort on par with human social support.

Are cats just less loving than dogs?

It's true that studies generally find stronger oxytocin responses in dog–human interactions. In one widely discussed 2016 experiment, scientists measured oxytocin in pets and owners before and after ten minutes of play. Dogs showed an average 57% spike in oxytocin levels after playtime, whereas cats showed about a 12% increase.

In humans, oxytocin levels rise during meaningful social interactions. Studies show that contact with a loved one produces stronger oxytocin responses than contact with strangers. So, a happy dog greeting is akin to that rush of seeing your child or partner.

Dogs, being pack animals domesticated for constant human companionship, are almost hard-wired to seek eye contact, petting and approval from us — behavior that stimulates oxytocin release in both parties. Cats, however, evolved from more solitary hunters which didn't need overt social gestures to survive. So, they may not display oxytocin-fueled behaviour as readily or consistently. Instead, cats may reserve their oxytocin-releasing behaviour for when they truly feel safe.

A cat's trust isn't automatic; it must be earned. But once given, it is reinforced by the same chemical that bonds human parents, partners and friends.

So, next time your cat blinks slowly from across the sofa or climbs on to your lap for a purr-filled cuddle, know that something invisible is happening too: oxytocin is rising in both your brains, deepening the trust and soothing the stress of daily life. Cats, in their own way, have tapped into the ancient biology of love.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A jaguar in Brazil has been documented making a record-breaking swim of up to 1.54 miles (2.48 kilometers). This distance is far beyond the previous verified record of around 650 feet (200 meters) for jaguars, according to the study authors.

Jaguars (Panthera onca) are adept swimmers, often inhabiting rainforest regions threaded with rivers that frequently overflow their banks. They dive into the waters of their Central and South American range without hesitation — but these dips are normally brief and undertaken to capture prey such as caimans, fish and turtles.

However, in a paper that appeared Sept. 10 on the preprint server bioRxiv, which has not been peer-reviewed, scientists documented a jaguar swimming a much greater distance.

The researchers reported that a male jaguar, first documented by camera trap photographs in May 2020 near the Serra da Mesa Hydroelectric Power Dam in Brazil's Goiás state, swam at least 0.79 miles (1.27 km) to reach a small island in an artificial lake created by the dam.

Related: 'It's pretty incredible, the guy's got three legs': Watch lion looking for sex make record-breaking swim across treacherous river filled with crocs and hippos

A camera trap stationed on the island captured the same male four years later, in August 2024. The spot patterns on its coat were used to verify that it was the same individual. An analysis of the distance between the mainland and the island in the reservoir showed that there were two possible ways for the jaguar to have reached the island.

First, it could have swum 0.66 miles (1.07 km) to a small islet before reentering the water and then swimming the remaining 0.79 miles. If the jaguar swam directly from the mainland to the island without stopping, it would have covered 1.54 miles in a single go, the researchers said.

Even if the swim were undertaken over two journeys, this still represents a record-breaking distance for jaguars, the authors wrote.

It is unclear why the jaguar made the swim. "Prey in this region appears to be fairly evenly distributed, lead author Leandro Silveira, a biologist with the Jaguar Conservation Fund, told Live Science. "Nothing suggests the island has more prey, nor do the shorelines. We think he decided to explore a new area — more likely related to searching for females or territory than a lack of food.

"We generally expect animals to seek the best cost-benefit option for movements, choosing narrower, less risky crossings," he added. "That's why this record was so surprising."

However, Fernando Tortato, a project coordinator for the big-cat conservation organization Panthera who wasn't involved with the paper or observations, notes that long swims probably are not unusual for jaguars.

"Most of the jaguar population is located in the Amazon basin," he told Live Science. "The main rivers there are in many places much larger than 1.6 kilometers. Some places are more than 10 kilometers. We know that jaguars do not see a river as a barrier."

Tortato thinks the jaguar may have been seeking a new location to hunt capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), another common source of prey. "It's quite common to see capybaras along these artificial lakes," he said. "That's my bet."

The elusive Pallas's cat has been photographed in a region of India's eastern Himalayas that it's never been seen in before. The camera trap image, showing the grumpy-looking, fluffy cat in a snowy landscape, is the first photographic evidence of the species in the state of Arunachal Pradesh.

Pallas's cats (Otocolobus manul) are among the world's least studied wild felines and are rarely photographed. Their appearance in Arunachal Pradesh represents a significant expansion of their known range in the eastern Himalayas, having already been spotted in Sikkim in India, Bhutan and eastern Nepal.

Between July and September 2024, researchers from WWF India and the Arunachal Pradesh Forest Department set up 136 camera traps across 83 remote, high-altitude sites between the West Kameng and Tawang districts.

Covering more than 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of rugged terrain, the devices remained active for over eight months — often in freezing temperatures and at elevations above 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) — making this one of the most extensive wildlife surveys ever attempted in the region.

The Pallas's cat was recorded at an elevation of 16,400 feet (4,992 m).

"The discovery of Pallas's Cat in Arunachal Pradesh at nearly 5,000 metres [16,400 ft] is a powerful reminder of how little we still know about life in the high Himalayas," Rishi Kumar Sharma, head of science and conservation at WWF India's Himalayas program, said in a statement.

"That a landscape can support snow leopards, clouded leopards, marbled cats, and now Pallas's cat alongside vibrant pastoral traditions speaks to its extraordinary richness and resilience."

Pallas's cats diverged from the leopard lineage about 5.2 million years ago, making them one of the oldest surviving wild cat species. Compact and thick-furred, they blend seamlessly into rocky, shrub-covered slopes.

They are ambush predators, emerging at dusk to hunt rodents, small birds, and lizards. To cope with the brutal cold of their environment, they stand on their bushy tails, using the fur to insulate their paws from frozen ground.

The survey also captured five other wild cat species in the region. This includes snow leopards (Panthera uncia), common leopards (Panthera pardus), clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa), leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis), and marbled cats (Pardofelis marmorata). In a rare behavioral observation, one snow leopard and one common leopard were even seen scent-marking at the same site — a glimpse into how these big cats navigate overlapping territories.

"The findings of this survey are remarkable and the discovery of multiple wild cats at such extreme elevations opens exciting new opportunities for ecological research and conservation," Taku Sai, senior project officer at WWF-India, said in the statement.

Pallas's cat, also known as a manul, is a feline from Central Asia that yelps like a small dog and has such short legs that it sometimes struggles to run after prey. Researchers think it is one of the oldest living cat species in the world, having diverged 5.2 million years ago from a leopard ancestor.

Although it looks stocky, Pallas's cat isn't actually much bigger than a domestic cat beneath its long, dense fur. This thick coat provides insulation against its environment, the freezing cold of Central Asia's steppe and high-altitude grassland ecosystems. The species is rarely seen because it is solitary and very secretive, spending the daytime in rock crevices and marmot burrows.

Pallas's cat comes out at dusk to hunt and stays out until dawn. It is an ambush predator, meaning it waits at the exits of rodent burrows until its prey appears — although some cats also stick their paws in to scoop out a meal, according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute.

Even if Pallas's cat is active during the day, the feline is hard to spot. Its coat is usually gray or light tan, but it can change color with the seasons to better blend into the local landscape, according to the National Zoo. Most of the hairs also have white tips, giving the cat a mottled or frosted appearance that is difficult to distinguish from rocks and shrubs in its natural surroundings.

For even more camouflage, Pallas's cat has rounded ears set so low on its head that it can peer over rocks without its ears peeking out. The only part of its body that protrudes is its bushy tail, which is about half as long as the head and body combined, according to the Felidae Conservation Fund.

Unlike other small cats, which have slit-like pupils, Pallas's cat has rounded pupils that are good for judging distances. The cat also yelps when it is scared or excited, which makes it sound more like a small dog than a feline, according to the National Zoo — but the species purrs and growls like any other small cat.

In the wild, Pallas's cat typically lives eight to nine years, according to the National Zoo. The cat uses scent to mark its territory, which is unusually large for such a small feline, with a range typically covering 3.5 to 7 square miles (9 to 18 square kilometers).

Pallas's cats are known to keep their paws warm by standing on their own tail, according to Edinburgh Zoo, but it's unclear whether a cold climate explains the feline’s grumpy appearance.

Florida panthers are recovering from the brink of extinction, thanks to a genetic boost from a group of panthers from Texas.

These Florida panthers (Puma concolor coryi) are a subspecies of mountain lion (also known as the puma or cougar) that now occupy less than 5% of their original territory due to hunting and habitat loss.

In the 1990s, fewer than 30 Florida panthers remained, and inbreeding threatened their survival. So to bolster the population's genetic diversity, scientists brought eight female panthers from Texas into Florida in 1995. Thirty years later, inbreeding has decreased, and the Florida panther population has risen to about 200. Importantly, despite the introduction of new genes, the genetic ancestry that makes Florida panthers their own subspecies hasn't been wiped out, according to a study published July 28 in the journal PNAS.

Following the introduction, the Florida panthers successfully interbred with five of the eight introduced Texas cats, and over time, their descendants showed fewer signs of inbreeding, such as kinked tails and reproductive issues.

But there was a risk that interbreeding the two populations would replace genetic variants unique to Florida panthers. Some of those variants might be adaptations that helped Florida panthers survive in their environment.

"One of the big concerns with bringing in individuals from Texas was that Florida's local genetic variation might get completely replaced," study co-author Diana Aguilar-Gómez, a conservation genomicist at UCLA, said in a statement. "That would be a problem if we are trying to preserve the subspecies that's unique to Florida."

Related: Giant Florida panther captured by wildlife officials is heaviest on record

To study the impacts of the Texas pumas' genes on the present-day Florida panther population, the researchers mapped the genomes of present-day Florida panthers that had both Texas and Florida ancestry. They also mapped the genomes of the five original Texas cats and four original Florida panthers for comparison.

The genes from the Texas pumas didn't swamp out the unique Florida ancestry, the scientists found. Instead, they reduced the effects of harmful genetic mutations brought about by inbreeding. "Our results show that Florida's genetics are still very much present," Aguilar-Gómez said.

Every organism inherits two copies of each gene, but only one gets expressed. If just one of the two copies has a harmful mutation, the organism will usually express the other copy. But if an organism inherits two copies with the mutation, it will end up with the harmful trait.

Breeding with the Texas cats increased heterozygosity — inheriting one mutated and one nonmutated copy of a gene — among the cats. The harmful mutations are still common in Florida panthers, but they're now less likely to be expressed.

But the benefits from the increased genetic diversity will likely be temporary, the researchers said.

"Our simulations suggest that the benefits of the translocation may not last forever," Aguilar-Gómez said. "Right now, harmful mutations are being masked by increased heterozygosity, but if the population stays small — like the current estimate of around 200 panthers — inbreeding could start rising again."

Florida panthers could need further interventions to prevent inbreeding from becoming a problem again in the future, the researchers said.

"This really underscores the need for continued monitoring and management of the Florida panther," Aguilar-Gómez added. "Another translocation might be necessary in the future, but that would need to be carefully evaluated and more genetic studies would need to be performed before taking that decision."

Big cats quiz: Can you get the lion's share of these questions right?

You may have noticed that your dog or cat tends to munch on grass from time to time. This may seem like an unusual choice for a snack, especially for cats, which are carnivores. So why do our pets eat grass?

"There's quite a few theories," said Dr. Jamie Lovejoy, a veterinarian at Stack Veterinary Hospital in Syracuse, New York. "We do see grass-eating behavior in both dogs and cats, and these are two species that technically really don't have the equipment to digest a lot of grass." For instance, grass-eating species tend to have special gut bacteria that helps break down grasses' tough cellulose, and many herbivores have multiple stomach chambers and a longer digestive tract to break down plant material.

One commonly repeated theory is that pets eat grass to settle an upset stomach, Lovejoy said. "Most of the time when it comes out, it comes out kind of unchanged, either by vomiting or defecation," she told Live Science. "And so I think it inspires a lot of old wives' tales."

However, research suggests that sickness may account for only a small percentage of times cats and dogs eat grass.

In 2008, researchers asked several groups of dog owners about their pets' grass-eating behavior. Of 1,571 owner responses to a web survey, 68% reported that their dogs ingested plants daily or weekly, yet only 8% said their dogs frequently showed signs of illness before eating the plants. Two similar surveys of cat owners published in the journal Animals in 2021 found that only 6% of cats in the first survey and 9% in the second survey appeared ill before eating grass, although 27% and 37% vomited frequently afterward. In the second survey, 71% of owners witnessed their cats eating plants at least six times.

The 2021 study also tested the idea that cats eat grass to help expel hair balls. Previous research had suggested that long-haired cats vomit up hair balls more often than short-haired felines do. Yet the study found "no evident difference" in the frequency of grass-eating behavior between the two groups.

Related: Why do cats throw up so much?

Researchers have observed grass eating in wild canines and felines too, which suggests it may be an innate behavior. Scientists have hypothesized that wild cats and wolves eat grass to clear their intestines of parasites, so perhaps domestic animals do the same.

"I think it's a little bit of a hard theory to test, at least in the United States … because most of our pets really don't have these high worm burdens," Lovejoy said. "So it'd be hard to see."

Despite grass having "no apparent nutritional value," according to the author of the 2008 study, some scientists have posited that perhaps dogs and cats consume grass for micronutrients like B vitamins, said Dr. Lori Teller, a clinical professor at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.

However, this likely isn't the case for most pets on a well-balanced diet, unless the dog or cat has underlying health issues.

"If you have a healthy pet who is getting a well-balanced diet and occasionally decides to go eat some grass, nibble on catnip, things like that, then [there's] absolutely nothing to worry about," Teller told Live Science. "If they're ravenous for these plants, or constantly eating them, or constantly eating them and then throwing up, then I would certainly be looking for an underlying problem."

Scientific studies on grass eating in cats and dogs are relatively scant, due to a lack of funding, Lovejoy explained. Pets rarely have major health issues from eating a lot of grass, and veterinary research tends to focus on how to treat more serious problems.

"I think a lot of these questions are kind of technically unanswered," she said.

But Lovejoy's current theory is simple: Mostly, our pets eat grass because they want to — maybe they like the taste, want some stimulation or are exploring their environments.

"There is no one reason why cats and dogs want to or choose to eat grass," Teller said. "There are probably as many reasons as there are different types of grass out there. Some dogs and cats just like it."

While grass-eating behavior is mostly harmless, pet owners should know that certain plants are poisonous. Lovejoy recommends checking the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' list of plants toxic to pets. Plants treated with certain chemicals may also be dangerous, so people should be cognizant of their use of pesticides and fertilizers. If pets are vomiting frequently or having abnormal stools, Teller recommends taking a trip to the vet.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

One of the most enduring stereotypes about domestic cats is that they absolutely despise getting wet. From frantically scrambling out of the bathtub to recoiling at the mist from a spray bottle, cats and water always seem to be at odds. And while some felines might not mind a swim — certain breeds, including Turkish Vans and Maine coons tend to adore the water — many cat owners know that this stereotype still rings true for their fur babies.

But why do cats hate water so much?

There isn't any dedicated scientific research on cats' relationship with water. But there are some potential clues in cats’ biology and evolutionary history, experts say, as well as in their individual upbringing.

Kristyn Vitale, an animal behaviorist and founder of Maueyes Cat Science and Education, suspects that the ancestor of the domestic cat, the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), may play a big role in why modern domestic cats avoid water.

Some wild cats, such as tigers, fishing cats and jaguars, like to swim in order to escape bugs, cool off and even ambush their prey. But the African wild cat mostly lives in desert environments, where it rarely encounters large bodies of water or swims.

"They are not particularly known for hunting near water or within the water," Vitale told Live Science in an email. "A large proportion of the African wildcat’s diet is made up of terrestrial animals, like rodents. Given this, it is not surprising that domestic cats don’t really seek out water. It is just not something this species was built to do."

However, Jonathan Losos, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023), told Live Science in an email he isn't totally convinced by this theory. He pointed out that just because an animal is from a desert doesn't mean it fears water, and that the range of African wildcats also extends to some less arid habitats — meaning some members of the species do encounter water in their lifetimes.

Jennifer Vonk, an animal cognition expert at Oakland University, brought up another potential reason house cats don't like water: being wet is physically uncomfortable and can potentially disrupt their sense of smell.

Related: Why do cats make a weird face after smelling something?

"Their fur does become waterlogged and make movement more cumbersome, which probably leaves them feeling vulnerable," Vonk told Live Science in an email.

Water can also mask a cat's natural odor, or bring with it new smells that cats are sensitive to. Cats may be able to detect chemical cues in tap water that they find unpleasant, Vonk said, and Vitale noted that getting wet may obscure a cat's natural pheromones, which could cause distress.

Ultimately, cats' hatred of water may not stem from a single source — it's probably a blend of multiple factors.

"It is likely a combination of being a natural aversion and a learned behavior," said Vitale.

On that note, a kitten's early experiences could play a big role in how they feel about water for the rest of their lives. While there's no direct research about whether exposing kittens to water makes them like it more, cat experts do know that exposing kittens to different sights, sounds, scents, textures and experiences helps them become more confident adults. This process is called socialization, and Vitale said it could apply to water as well.

"It is likely that if a kitten grew up around water, they would be more comfortable around water as an adult," she explained. "With that said, every cat is an individual. Even with water exposure, some kittens may still show water aversion, while other kittens who have never been exposed to water might enjoy it."

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

Cat owners know that their feline friends can be a bit eccentric. From licking plastic bags to getting the zoomies, domestic cats certainly have some strange habits. Recently, some cat lovers have drawn attention to another strange fixation in their pets: an obsession with concrete. In fact, some cat owners have even brought rectangular concrete pavers from the hardware store home for their felines.

But why do cats love concrete so much?

There isn't any direct scientific research about cats and concrete. But one expert does have a few ideas for why some cats love to lounge, scratch and roll around on concrete blocks.

According to Jonathan Losos, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023), our feline friends are naturally curious, and they are likely drawn to the texture of concrete and possibly even its shape.

"Cats probably like the feel of the rough surface," Losos told Live Science in an email. Concrete's coarse texture allows cats to scratch and clean themselves, hitting parts of the body they couldn't otherwise reach.

Concrete also provides a perfect place for cats to mark their territory, Losos added. Cats have scent glands, located all around their faces and bodies, that release pheromones. These pheromones are used to mark territory and send social signals to other nearby cats, and they're released when cats rub those scent glands on objects.

Related: Why do cats make a weird face after smelling something?

In addition, cats from viral social media videos may be drawn to concrete blocks not because of the concrete itself but because they're naturally inquisitive creatures, Losos speculated.

"I suspect they'd react at least with curiosity if you put any new object in their home," Losos said. "To really examine this, someone needs to do an experiment."

To tease apart whether cats are particularly interested in concrete or just curious about any new object, Losos suggested giving cats a concrete, block-shaped object made of smooth plastic instead, or a soft cat bed in the same shape. Then, the cats could be observed to determine whether it's specifically the material of concrete the cats are drawn to, or if they'd interact with any novel, similarly shaped object.

Losos also wonders how much of cats' reaction to concrete in viral videos has to do with the blocks' rectangular shape.

"This also reminded me of the craze a few years ago of putting squares or rectangles on the floor, often just made by masking tape, and cats would sit within their borders," Losos said. "This seems to be related to cats' love of being in boxes."

Cats like to hang out in boxes because the shelter brings them comfort. But their love for boxes extends beyond three-dimensional rectangular shapes — they also seem to enjoy two-dimensional box shapes.

In fact, a 2021 study found that cats will choose to sit within a two-dimensional illusion of a square, showing just how much they love lounging in rectangular spaces. Losos pointed out that concrete tiles are also rectangular, so they might trigger cats' instinct to sit on the blocks.

To test whether cats are drawn to the concrete blocks' shape, Losos suggested putting out concrete objects in different shapes and seeing which one cats interact with most.

"This is a fascinating phenomenon crying out for some good scientific research!" Losos said.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

There's plenty of things to love about cats, and purring is definitely one of them. Cat owners can always tell when their pet is happy from their low, contented hums. But do any other animals purr?

The answer depends on how exactly you define "purr," said Jonathan Losos, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023)

"If the question is, 'what animals purr,' I would respond by, 'what do you mean by purr?'," Losos told Live Science.

The first important component of a purr is its context. Cats are known to purr when they're happy, but they can also purr when they're stressed or in pain. Cats start purring shortly after birth, and both mothers and kittens often purr while locating each other and during nursing.

The second component of a purr is its physical mechanism. Scientists still don't fully understand how cats purr, but an important feature of purring is vibration of the larynx, the structure in the throat known as the voice box in humans. Unlike most other animal vocalizations, which happen only during exhalation, purrs happen continuously as the cat breathes in and out.

"It's very constant, and that's really one of the signatures of a cat purring," Losos explained.

Related: Why do cats purr?

That continuous sound makes felines unique in their ability to purr. Domestic cats (Felis catus), however, aren't the only cat species that purr — wild cats such as cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), cougars (Puma concolor), servals (Leptailurus serval) and bobcats (Lynx rufus) can all purr, too.

Some scientists think that instead of categorizing different species as "big" or "small" cats, it's actually more accurate to classify cats as "purring" or "roaring." Lions (Panthera leo), tigers (Panthera tigris), jaguars (Panthera onca) and leopards (Panthera pardus) can't purr, but they can roar, likely due to the anatomy of a structure in their throat called the hyoid.

Outside of the cat family tree, though, continuous purring vocalizations are very rare. The only other animal that's known to purr during inhalation and exhalation is a distant cousin of cats called a genet (genus Genetta).

"They are delightful little animals," Losos said. He described their appearance as a cross between a cat and a mongoose, with long, pointed noses and slender bodies. There are at least two species of genets that are known to purr, Losos said, although it's possible there are more whose purrs haven't been documented by researchers yet.

Animals that (kind of) purr

True purring is unique to cats and genets. But with a looser definition of purring that doesn't focus on the continuous vibration during both inhalation and exhalation, there are many species across the animal kingdom that also make buzzing, rumbly noises, often in similar contexts to cat purring.

Raccoons (Procyon lotor), for example, "purr" when they're happy and relaxed, usually when babies are with their mothers. Suzanne MacDonald, a professor of psychology at York University who regularly works with raccoons, even witnessed an orphaned baby raccoon "purr" while she hand-fed it.

"They don't sound exactly like cats purring, but pretty close!" MacDonald told Live Science in an email. "When you hear it, you know you're doing something right."

There's not much research on raccoon "purring," but MacDonald believes the sound comes from a combination of a raccoon vocalization called a chitter and excess saliva from the raccoons being very relaxed — a very different mechanism to how felines purr.

Many other mammals make vibrating noises to express comfort. For example, some rabbit owners report their pets rapidly chatter their teeth together when they're relaxed, creating a vibrating sound similar to a purr. Bats can "purr" when being held by a trusted human, one bat expert told The Irish Times. And researchers have noted that when mother and kit gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) are together, they make a purring-like sound called a "muk-muk."

Some animals that "purr" aren't even mammals. Take wolf spiders (Gladicosa gulosa), which, when attracting potential mates, strike specialized body parts against each other to make a purring sound, similar to how crickets create their chirps.

While many animals do make noises that share some resemblance to cat purrs, there's still a lot of questions. Because many animals make these vibrating noises when they're relaxed, it's a difficult behavior to study, because the presence of human researchers can inherently stress animals out.

But one thing is clear: By the strict definition of purring, cats really are special.

Cats can smell the difference between their human friends and strangers from just a few sniffs of our body odor, a new study suggests.

Domestic cats (Felis catus) use smell to communicate with each other and hunt, so it's an important sense for our feline friends. However, the new study, published May 28 in the journal PLOS One, marks the first time researchers have tested whether cats can distinguish different humans by smell.

The researchers found that cats spent longer sniffing a scent swabbed from a stranger than the scent of their owner, which indicates our pets recognize humans they are familiar with and put more energy into learning strange smells from people they don't know.

"A shorter sniffing time suggests that when cats came across the smell of their guardian, they recognised it quickly and moved along," Julia Henning, a doctoral candidate researching feline behavior at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who was not involved in the study, wrote in The Conversation. "But when they came to the swabs from an unknown person, the cat sniffed longer, using their superior sense of smell to gather information about the scent."

Related: Scientists solve mystery of how orange cats got their coats — and why so many are male

Previous studies have established that cats recognize their owner's voices and distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar human faces — though they're not as good at this as dogs. Cats can also pick up on changes to their owner's emotional states, some of which they recognize through body odor. However, until this latest research, researchers didn't know the extent to which cats can recognize different humans from scent alone.

In the new study, researchers presented cats with three plastic tubes; one containing the scent of their owner, one containing the scent of a stranger and one containing no human scent to act as a control. The scientists obtained the scents by swabbing human participants under the armpit, behind the ear and between the toes.

The findings that cats spend longer sniffing a stranger's scent than their owner's (or the control) align with previous research about cat smelling behavior. For example, weaned kittens smell unknown female cats for longer than their mothers, so there's a relationship between smell length and familiarity.

In addition to smelling for longer, the researchers also found that cats were more likely to sniff the unknown odors with their right nostril first, before switching to their left nostril. This nostril preference suggests that cats use different sides of their brain for different tasks, which scientists have found to be the case in dogs, fish and some other animals too, according to the study.

While the new findings suggest that cats can at least distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar people, researchers still don't know whether cats can tell the difference between specific people with whom they are familiar.

"The odor stimuli used in this study were only those of known and unknown persons," study co-author Hidehiko Uchiyama, a professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture in Japan, told BBC News. "Behavioral experiments in which cats are presented with multiple known-person odor stimuli would be needed, and we would need to find specific behavioral patterns in cats that appear only in response to the owner's odor."

A large predator lurks in the brush, flashing a long tail and fur printed with telltale black and tan rosettes. It must surely be a leopard. Or … could it be a jaguar? With their stealthy hunting habits and similar builds, patterns and hues, the two large cats can be strikingly difficult to tell apart. What, in fact, is the difference between a leopard and a jaguar?

To begin with, they live in completely different parts of the world, with jaguars found in the Americas today, and leopards occurring across a large range spanning Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia.

"They're on the opposite sides of the globe, but a long time ago they shared a common ancestor," Allison Devlin, jaguar program director for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, told Live Science.

Jaguars and leopards are part of the Panthera genus, which also includes lions, tigers and snow leopards. Tigers and snow leopards form their own branch of the Panthera family tree, while leopards, jaguars and lions are grouped together on another branch because they descend from a separate common ancestor.

However, between 3.6 million and 2.5 million years ago, jaguars split from the common ancestor shared by their leopard and lion cousins. The origins of the Panthera genus are uncertain, but fossil evidence shows that jaguars dispersed across the Eurasian plateau about 2 million years ago, and from here they migrated across the Bering Land Bridge during the last ice age to North America, and eventually down into Mexico through South America, where this species occurs today. In fact jaguars are the only Panthera lineage that occurs in the Western Hemisphere, and exist as just one species across their entire range, Devlin said.

Meanwhile, leopards split off from their closer relatives, lions, about 2 million years ago, and spread into Africa, Southeast and Northeast Asia, where they occur as eight regional subspecies across this range today. This evolutionary history means that leopards and jaguars are different species that aren't even each other's closest relative, despite their striking similarities.

Most noticeable among these common features is their spots, but even these have subtle differences that can be used to tell the animals apart.

"The rosettes on the jaguar quite often have spots in the middle of them, whereas the leopard doesn't," Tara Pirie, a lecturer in ecology and conservation at the University of Surrey in the U.K., told Live Science. She shared another clue: "[Leopard] rosettes are tightly packed, whereas the jaguar, with the spot in the middle, their rosettes are quite large and not as tightly packed."

Related: What's the difference between apes and monkeys?

Their shared ancestry might partly explain why these two remote species both have spots. But it could also be an adaptive response to the environments they live in, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution, Devlin explained.

Rosettes, spots and other light-and-dark mixed patterns are in fact quite common in felid predators that live in partly-shaded landscapes, where their spots help keep them camouflaged. Jaguars and leopards both occur in places with partial forest cover, and both animals also rely on ambush tactics to hunt. So their coats provide critical camouflage enabling them to sneak up and pounce on prey at close range, Devlin said.

There are, however, some key differences in their hunting styles that also reveal striking physiological distinctions between the two animals.

"The way I think of it is that a leopard is built more like your all-around athlete. They can climb trees, they can run, they can ambush," Devlin said. "For jaguars, they're built more like a bodybuilder, where they're heavier in the barrel, in the chest and in the head. And part of that is related to their hunting techniques."

Jaguars are real heavyweights that can reach up to 260 pounds (120 kilograms). Their generally stockier frames include a much bulkier head than leopards have, formed by larger bones that support bigger muscles and give this animal some of the strongest jaws in the cat family, Devlin said.

Whereas most cats kill their prey through strangulation or breaking the neck, the jaguar's powerful bite gives it the extraordinary ability to kill its prey by puncturing the skull. Their bite is so strong that they can crush through the upper shells of tortoises and sea turtles, both of which they target as prey, Devlin explained.

On the other hand, at a much lighter 176 pounds (80 kg), leopards kill prey through suffocation, by biting the throat. Their smaller frames allow them to spring up into trees — something that jaguars can also do, although in general they spend far less time in trees. The leopard's arboreal preferences, meanwhile, have given them the advantage of being able to store or "cache" prey away from others' prying eyes, Pirie said.

Up in the canopy, the leopard's nimble-footed ways are helped along by another key tell that separates them from jaguars: a lengthier tail. "Whereas in the leopard, it could be up to a meter [3.2 feet long], in the jaguar it is maybe 60 centimeters [1.9 feet]. So even just that 40 centimeters [1.3 feet] could bring a lot more balance," Pirie said.

With these features as a guide, it's just about possible to tell leopards and jaguars apart. But nature has one more trick up her sleeve: all-black leopards and jaguars. The satiny sable coats on these animals are caused by a genetic mutation, and while they might look like it, they are not a different species. In fact, they're what's known as the "melanistic phase" of the species in each case, according to Devlin.

Interestingly, in both leopards and jaguars, these darker cats appear more commonly in heavily-shaded habitats. Black jaguars occur more in the dimly-lit depths of the Amazon rainforest, Devlin said.

Meanwhile "you've got leopards over in [the Malaysian jungle], they tend to be melanistic … which would help blend them in with that dense habitat," Pirie said.

The rarity of melanistic leopards and jaguars makes them even more vulnerable than their regularly-spotted siblings, who are threatened by hunting, shrinking habitats and the illegal wildlife trade. As a result, jaguars and leopards share the unfortunate fact that their populations are both in decline, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

But we have the tools to change that, Devlin said. "If they have the habitat, the prey and the protection that they need, they can persist."

The origins of domestic cats, and their travels with ancient humans, are as enigmatic as the animals themselves. But now, scientists have found new evidence supporting the idea that the unfathomable felines were likely first domesticated in ancient Egypt, where they were worshipped as part of a cult — or in another region of North Africa.

Researchers already knew that modern-day lap cats (Felis catus) derived from African wildcats (Felis lybica). But exactly when and where these wildcats first accepted human companionship is a matter of intense debate.

Now, two studies published on the preprint server bioRxiv in March 2025 — meaning they have not yet been peer-reviewed — offer tantalizing new insights into how the world's second-most-popular pet may have come to coexist with humanity and spread around the world.

One of the prevailing hypotheses is that cats were domesticated in the Levant, a region of the Middle East bordering the Mediterranean Sea, during the Neolithic period 12,000 to 5,000 years ago.

The region is part of the Fertile Crescent, where agriculture first emerged. The theory suggests that when humans switched from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming, rodents became a problem. Cats were attracted to the rodents and, given the felines were eating the pests, humans were happy to cohabit with them.

Related: Over 40% of pet cats play fetch — but scientists aren't quite sure why

This theory is based on the discovery of a cat buried at the foot of a human in Cyprus, which is off the coast of Turkey and Syria.

"The first evidence of human association with a cat comes from Cyprus about 10,000 years ago," Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023), told Live Science. That suggested the cat-human association may have begun in the Fertile Crescent, said Losos, who was not involved with the new research.

But both of the new papers cast doubt on this idea, suggesting cat domestication actually took place much later, and that cat remains suggesting earlier interactions were actually wildcats.

In one of the news studies, the researchers conducted genetic analyses on early cat specimens, which revealed that cats found in Europe and Turkey from between 11,000 and 2,300 years ago were not the direct ancestors of today's domestic cats. They were instead European wildcats (Felis silvestris) that had naturally hybridized with African wildcats where the ranges of the species overlapped.

"We successfully reconstructed nuclear genomes of several Neolithic cats from Anatolia and Southeast Europe and proved that these cats are European wildcats," said Marco De Martino, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and lead author of the first study.

"They were likely exploited for food, pelts or ritual practices," he told Live Science. These weren't pets — they were meant for the stew pot or the collar of a luxurious cloak or as offerings to deities.

Instead, the researchers suggest that cat domestication occurred in Africa — either in Egypt or another northern area of the continent, such as modern-day Morocco or Tunisia.

Their analysis indicated that modern domestic cats are most genetically similar to African wildcats from Tunisia.

Ancient Egyptian cats

To piece together the domestic cat's introduction to the world, the authors then looked at non-genetic evidence of cats in societies in ancient times.

Egypt was the most prominent early civilization to encourage the presence of cats, with evidence indicating that they were well-established there by the first millennium B.C., according to the authors.

They were worshipped as part of the cult of Bastet, an Egyptian goddess associated with fertility, health, protection and domestic life. Cats are common in ancient Egyptian imagery, both as members of human households and in the form of Bastet herself — early depictions of the goddess style her as a lion, but she later resembled a domestic cat.

Based on evidence both from iconography and extensive mummification of cats as part of the worship of Bastet, the second paper concludes that Egypt was likely the main center of cat domestication. While the felines may have been drawn to agricultural production by rodents, one variation of the the hypothesis suggests that they were bred for the production of mummies used in devotional rituals. The large-scale breeding operations may have initiated the domestication process.

Cats likely then moved north from Egypt via trade routes. Specimens found in the U.K., date to the late Iron Age, suggesting there was one early wave of cats entering Europe during this period. Domesticated cats then moved into Europe with greater intensity during periods of Greek and Roman dominance.

However, the authors caution that genetic data from mummified cat remains in Egypt has not yet been reliably analyzed. "We believe that Egypt remains the best candidate as the birthplace of domestic cats given the extensive extant iconographic evidence, but we have no genetic data from Egypt to demonstrate that," noted De Martino, who was a co-author on the second paper as well.

Genetically, at least, origins in western North Africa may be on firmer ground.

"The lack of genomic data from ancient or modern cats in Egypt is the big question mark that needs to be answered — when that is added, it may swing genetic support back to the Out of Egypt hypothesis," Losos said.

Cat quiz: Can you get a purr-fect score?

Paws what you're doing, it's time for the ultimate cat quiz.

Cats are adorable. Fact! From their squishy "toe beans" to their swishy tails, they've made their way into our homes and our hearts. They're one of the world's most popular pets, but how much do we really know about our fluffy friends?

Our cuddly (and sometimes not so cuddly) companions have been intertwined with human lives for millennia: the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with cats, you've probably heard of the famous Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, and if you've been on the internet long enough, you'll have come across cat celebrities like the lovable Grumpy Cat and Lil BUB.

Yet, despite thousands of years together, there are many cat questions left unanswered. Why do they purr? What do their miaows and chattering actually mean? And who really domesticated who?

Take the quiz below to find out if you're the cat's whiskers or just kitten yourself. Only the cleverest of kitties will land on their feet in this quiz. Pspspsps… check out our big cats quiz too!

If you need a hint, click the yellow button. Good luck!

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Orange cats have a unique genetic mutation that gives them their special coats — and this mutation also explains why so many of them are male, two new studies find.

Many animals have orange hair, including some humans, but only in domestic cats are males more likely to be orange than females. Researchers have long known there must be something special about ginger cat genetics, and with this newly identified mutation, they've finally solved the mystery.

The mutation deletes a section of the cat's DNA, and increases the activity of a gene in X chromosomes — thread-like structures of DNA that carry hereditary information passed on from parent to offspring.

In humans and cats, males typically have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, while females have two X chromosomes. So if male cats have an X chromosome that carries the mutation, then they'll become orange. Female cats, on the other hand, need to inherit the mutation on both of their Xs to be completely orange.

Researchers had previously assumed that the mutation would be on the X chromosome because of the skewed sex ratio — it also explains why calico and tortoiseshell cats, which have patches of orange mixed in with black and white, are usually female. In these cases, the cats have inherited one mutated X chromosome.

Two research teams, one led by Christopher Kaelin at Stanford University in the U.S. and the other led by Hiroyuki Sasaki at Kyushu University in Japan, independently discovered that the mutation affects a gene called ARHGAP36. The teams shared their findings in separate studies published Thursday (May 15) in the journal Current Biology.

"Identifying the gene has been a longtime dream, so it’s a joy to have finally cracked it," Sasaki, a geneticist at Kyushu University and self-proclaimed cat-lover, said in a statement released by the university.

Related: Cats are better at word association than human babies are, study finds

Researchers have been studying cat coat genetics since the beginning of the 20th century, and yet the orange mutation, which the Stanford team called "sex-linked orange," has remained elusive until now.

"It's a genetic exception that was noticed over a hundred years ago," Kaelin, a senior scientist in genetics at Stanford University, said in a statement released by the university. "It's really that comparative genetic puzzle that motivated our interest in sex-linked orange."

Both research teams discovered the mutation by looking at the DNA of different cats. The Japanese team, which crowdfunded more than $70,000 to conduct the research, found that all of the orange cats they studied shared a mutation, or "meow-tation," that deleted a section of DNA in the ARHGAP36 gene, according to the Kyushu statement. They then examined calico cat tissues and found that ARHGAP36 was more active in the cats' orange patches than in their black or white patches.

"This suggests that when present, this section of DNA normally suppresses ARHGAP36 activity," Sasaki said. "When missing, ARHGAP36 stays active."

Mammals get their colors from a pigment-producing substance called melanin. Two types of melanin affect coat color: eumelanin, responsible for dark brown and black, and pheomelanin, responsible for yellow, red or orange. In orange fur, the more active ARHGAP36 may drive pigment production towards higher levels of pheomelanin, and ginger fur, according to the Kyushu statement.

Orange cat behavior

ARHGAP36 is active throughout the body, including in the brain and hormonal glands, so it's possible the sex-linked orange mutation affects orange cats in other ways, too. Some pet owners swear that orange cats are sillier than other cats, but the Stanford researchers looked at gene expression in the brain and didn't find differences between orange and non-orange cats.

Kaelin thinks that their chaotic reputation is more likely due to most orange cats being males — suggesting males are more chaotic — but couldn't rule out ARHGAP36 being a factor, possibly by affecting other tissue in the body.

Origins of orange

The new study doesn't reveal when the mutation first emerged. However, Kaelin thinks it probably arose early on in the domestication process.

"We know that because there are paintings that date to the 12th century where you see clear images of calico cats," Kaelin said. "So, the mutation is quite old."

Humans first domesticated cats thousands of years ago. To find out whether the mutation goes back millennia, researchers will have to find ancient evidence of orange cats. Sasaki is keen to explore the mutation's origins.

"One idea is to study ancient Egyptian cat paintings—or even to test DNA from mummified cats—to see if any cats back then were orange," Sasaki said. "It's ambitious, but I’m excited to try."

"Big cats" are living members of the genus Panthera. There are five big cat species, including lions and tigers.

They are found on most continents — including Africa, Asia and South America — and in various types of environment, such as savannas and jungles. Like all felids (cats), they are carnivorous.

Big cats often sit at the top of the food chain, which means they have a large impact on ecosystems, mostly resulting from predation, which helps to keep animal populations in check. To preserve energy, big cats have evolved to lie in wait for their prey before pouncing to make a kill.

Big cats are some of the most charismatic creatures on Earth, but how much do you know about these fierce predators? Put your head in the lion's mouth and take our quiz to find out.

Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button. Hakuna matata!

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The earliest known domestic cat in what is now the United States perished 466 years ago in a shipwreck off the coast of Florida, a new study finds.

The ship was part of a Spanish colonizing expedition led by the conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano, who was voyaging from Mexico under the Spanish crown. In September 1559, a hurricane in Pensacola Bay wrecked several of the 11 ships, which had been anchored near the new Spanish settlement of Santa María de Ochuse. Researchers found one of these wrecks, known as Emanuel Point II, in 2006. This shipwreck holds the remains of an adult and a juvenile domestic cat (Felis catus), according to the new study, which was published April 14 in the journal American Antiquity.

"Our current understanding is that all domestic cats come from ancestors in the Middle East. So, they had to be introduced to the Americas by people," said study co-author Martin Welker, an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in zooarchaeology at the University of Arizona.

Archaeologists had previously found domestic cat remains in other early Spanish settlements, including the Indigenous Taíno town of En Bas Saline in what is now Haiti, where Chistopher Columbus landed in 1492. But Columbus never made it to continental North America. Instead, "the Spanish expeditions in Florida were really the first opportunities for domestic cats to reach what is today the U.S.," Welker told Live Science in an email.

Related: Pet cats arrived in China via the Silk Road 1,400 years ago, ancient DNA study finds

The team analyzed the cat bones using several techniques, including zooarchaeological (comparing the bones from the shipwreck to the bones of modern cats), isotopic (surveying different chemical signatures) and genetic (studying ancient DNA) analyses, Welker said. The results confirmed that the bones belonged to domestic cats and provided insights into their feline ancestries as well as the adult cat's diet.

"What was interesting, is that our cat was not eating the rats on board the ship but had a diet more in line with what we'd expect for the sailors," study co-author John Bratten, an anthropologist at the University of West Florida, told Live Science in an email. This indicates that the sailors fed the adult cat either because the rats did not provide enough food, or out of affection, the researchers wrote in the study.

"It was interesting to think about the idea of the cat being a pet or one that was looked after by the Spanish sailors," Bratten added.

The genetic analyses suggest that both the adult and juvenile cats descended from European relatives. While it's impossible to determine how the cats got onto the ship, one idea is that they slipped aboard while it was anchored or docked in Mexico before sailing for Florida, Bratten said.

However, they may have been brought aboard intentionally, given that cats helped control the rat and mice populations that could get into food supplies and transmit diseases, Welker said.

It wouldn't be surprising if the cats had been mousers, because "from their domestication until their arrival in the New World, cats' primary role in many communities was pest control, something that they were well suited to and that required little supervision from their human cohabitants," the researchers wrote in the study. The ancient Romans likely introduced cats to Europe for this reason, according to the study.

Today, one in every three U.S. households has a pet cat, according to the study, and there are more than 600 million domestic cats worldwide.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:49 a.m. ET on April 30 to correct the caption of the animal bones photo. It includes both cat and rat remains, not just cat remains as was previously stated.

Bite marks on a 1,800-year-old skeleton from Roman Britain suggest that a gladiator was mauled to death by a large cat, possibly a lion, a new study reports.

However, scholars who were not involved with the research had mixed responses to the team's findings, with one expert saying that this person would not have been a gladiator and wondered if the individual was instead a condemned prisoner.

Despite the disagreement, a few things are certain: The man's bones reveal that he was decapitated, possibly when he was dying or already dead. "The decapitation of this individual was likely either to put him out of his misery at the point of death, or for the sake of conforming to customary practice," the authors wrote in the new study, which was published Wednesday (April 23) in the journal PLOS One.

The shape and depth of the bite marks found on the man's skeleton indicate that a large cat, possibly a lion, had mauled him. "The shape is entirely consistent with documented cases of large cat bite," the team wrote in the paper.

The man, who was between 26 and 35 years old at the time of his death, was buried in a cemetery that is thought to contain the burials of other gladiators. In Roman times, the cemetery was in Eboracum, which is now the modern-day city of York, England.

Related: Did Roman gladiators really fight to the death?

The individual, who was excavated in 2004 and 2005, has two possible identities, said study co-author John Pearce, a reader in archaeology at King's College London: a trained gladiator who fought the large cat with a weapon, or a man who had been condemned to death and had fought bare-handed or while tied to a post.

Pearce thinks the likeliest scenario is that the man was a trained gladiator. "The likelihood of this is high in this case because of the argument that the cemetery in which he is buried is one for gladiators," Pearce told Live Science in an email.

The other skeletons unearthed at the cemetery have injuries consistent with those of gladiators. "There is evidence of healed trauma in the collection of bodies recovered from this site which suggests repeated fighting," study first author Timothy Thompson, vice president for students and learning at Maynooth University in Ireland, who has a background in forensic anthropology, told Live Science in an email. Moreover, many of the buried individuals were beheaded, which sometimes happened to defeated gladiators at the end of a fight, the team wrote in the paper.

The fight in which the man died likely would have taken place in an amphitheater in the city. "As a major city in Britain and the home of a legion, Roman York would almost certainly have had at least one amphitheatre," Pearce said. However, the amphitheater's exact location is unclear.

Although images of fights against beasts have been found at Roman sites and textual accounts mention these battles, there has been little anthropological evidence of them until now. This is "the first physical evidence for human-animal gladiatorial combat from the Roman period seen anywhere in Europe," the team wrote in the paper.

Long trip for a cat

The large cat would have been brought to York through a combination of sea, river and road travel, Pearce said, noting that there was "no native big cat fauna" in England. The large cat may have been brought all the way from North Africa.

"The cat would have been brought via the well-established supply routes that linked York," Pearce said. He noted that the rivers of continental Europe, such as the Rhine and Rhone, may have been used to move the cat. The animal would have been caged or in a crate during this journey, and it would have been difficult for its handlers to have kept it fed without getting mauled. It's not clear if the animal's handlers had some form of tranquilizer they could use.

There would have been a high risk of the animal dying due to the stress of the lengthy journey, Pearce noted.

Controversial conclusions

Scholars who weren't involved with the research had mixed reactions to the team's findings.

Alfonso Mañas, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who has studied gladiators extensively, was doubtful about many of the team's findings. For instance, this man could not have been a gladiator, Mañas said, because in the Roman Empire, people who fought beasts were either condemned prisoners or venatores, fighters trained to fight beasts — neither of whom were considered gladiators. Gladiator researchers are "trying to eliminate the old mistake that gladiators fought beasts," Mañas told Live Science.

He also noted that the tooth marks could have come from wolves, which are indigenous to Britain, rather than from a lion or other large cat. One possibility is that this man was executed through beheading and was bitten by a wolf or dog afterward, Mañas said.

Other researchers thought the findings presented in the article were plausible. The conclusions are "certainly an interesting and exciting prospect," Jordon Houston, an honorary academic in the Department of Classical Studies and Ancient History at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told Live Science in an email. "Overall, this is a great article and very well researched."

Mike Bishop, an independent scholar who has extensively studied Roman gladiators and the Roman military, told Live Science in an email that "the paper is certainly interesting, largely for confirming what was already suspected — that human/large animal combat occurred in the north-western provinces of the empire."

Michael Carter, a professor of classics and archaeology at Brock University in Canada who has studied gladiators extensively, was generally supportive of the paper's findings. The team's analysis is "convincing, and justifies the speculation that the person was killed by a large cat," Carter told Live Science in an email. "The scenario that I imagine is most likely is that the victim had been condemned to the beasts."

If you let your cat wander outside, they may come home with an unpleasant surprise, like a dead bird or rodent, in its jaws. This may be bewildering to pet owners. After all, why would your cat kill an animal without the need to eat it and then give it to you as a "gift"?

It isn't because you aren't feeding Fluffy enough. Instead, it lies in your kitty's evolutionary history. "Cats are predatory by nature," said Dr. Stephanie Liff, a veterinarian and medical director at Pure Paws Veterinary Care in New York City. Although cats were domesticated over 10,000 years ago, modern domestic cats have generally retained their instinct to catch prey. This means that they have a drive to hunt.

There are a couple of hypotheses for why cats bring their catch home, Emmanuelle Baudry, an urban ecologist at Paris-Saclay University, told Live Science. The main hypothesis is that this behavior is maternal. In the wild, mother cats go out and hunt and then bring the food back for their kittens. This not only feeds the young cats but also provides something for them to play, practice how to hunt and recognize prey. So, in the context of human pet owners, our cats may see us as "not so efficient kittens," Baudry said.

But that doesn't mean your pet is insulting you. To the contrary: "It's somewhat of a compliment," Liff told Live Science. "They feel comfortable in their home. They consider you part of their family.

Another theory, she said, is that cats may feel safer eating their prey at home rather than in the outside world. In this case, cats see your home as a place of refuge, where they can have their privacy, stash their cache, or eat their meal in peace.

Related: Why do cats have 'toe beans'?

Although some cats hunt constantly, others rarely do. Researchers have long noted this discrepancy among domestic cats. There are three main factors that seem to affect whether a cat is a frequent hunter: its personality, the surrounding environment and how owners manage their cats, Baudry said.

In a 2023 study in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Baudry and colleagues dove into the factor of personality. Their study showed that dominant, aggressive and active cats, as noted by their owners, brought back more dead animals into the home. In contrast, cats that were shy and friendly with their owners tended to bring home less prey.

The study, as well as other research, also found that how much hunting a cat does depends on both its environment and how much time it spends outside. For instance, a cat that lives in a rural area may have more space to roam and access to more prey than city cats do, so urban pet owners may get fewer dead animals brought to them than those in the countryside.

Can you stop them bringing home prey?

There are some steps you can take to reduce the number of unsightly gifts from your cat. "Just restricting what they're able to find to kill can limit the behavior," Liff said. This means keeping your cat indoors or taking down bird feeders near your home. However, Liff noted that a cat's drive to hunt needs to be satisfied in other ways, such as giving them toys they can chase and pounce on.

Reducing the number of animals pet cats catch and kill is also good for nature. Cats are one of the leading causes of declines of wildlife populations; they kill billions of birds and mammals every year, even pushing some species on islands to go extinct. Keeping cats indoors is also beneficial for their health, Liff said, since prey may carry parasites, rabies or other diseases, like avian flu. It's also helpful to get your cat vaccinated against these threats.

So the next time your cat brings you a dead animal, know that it's a natural instinct and a potential form of affection and that there are ways to prevent these unwanted presents. "If you don't want to see the behavior, you have to limit their access to do it," Liff said.

The domestic cat is one of the smallest members of the family Felidae — the group that includes lions, tigers, jaguars and cougars. It is also the only member of that family that has been domesticated.

Cats have lived among humans for thousands of years. They probably started hanging around human grain stores, attracted by mice and other vermin, and eventually spread around the world as sailors brought them aboard ships.

Today, cats still help humans control pests, as well as provide companionship. In the past few centuries, humans have bred some cats to display certain traits, like hairlessness, thereby establishing dozens of cat breeds. With their charming mix of aloofness and goofiness, cats continue to amuse and fascinate us.

Everything you need to know about domestic cats

Discover more about cats

—Did cats really disappear from North America for 7 million years?

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—Cat brains are shrinking, and it's all humans' fault

Sometimes it can feel like cats live in their own little world. They zoom around the house as if they own the place, communicate with subtle signals, and hate it when we close the door.

Cats also like to lick — a lot. And they lick plenty of things that aren't food. When cats lick or suck on an inedible material, it is called "wool sucking." But they don't suck only on wool — they also do it with leather, rubber and plastic.

"Each cat has its own particular predilection," said Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a professor emeritus of animal behavior at Tufts University and a veterinarian who has been studying compulsive behavior in animals for over 30 years.

But why do cats lick plastic bags and other nonedible things? And is it dangerous?

One theory is that this behavior comes from a cat's desire to nurse as a kitten. Siamese cats are the most likely to exhibit wool sucking, and they are also the breed that nurses with their mothers the longest, Dodman said.

"They would like to stay with their mums and cycle a nurse for 12 or 14 weeks," he explained. "And then they're placed at nine weeks. They've still got this suckling drive. And it has to go somewhere." He thinks that drive is what leads cats to suck on wool, leather and plastic.

Related: Why do cats have bald spots in front of their ears?

Other cat breeds nurse for only around seven weeks, so if they leave their mothers at nine weeks, they don't have this suckling desire anymore, he said.

Dr. Valarie Tynes, a veterinarian who specializes in animal behavior, is less certain about Dodson's weaning theory because it hasn't yet been proved experimentally yet. But she agreed that plastic sucking is some kind of self-soothing behavior for the cats, similar to how human babies suck their thumbs.

As far as whether it's dangerous, licking plastic, on its own, doesn't worry Tynes. "If this cat has always licked unusual things ever since it was a young cat and it doesn't do it for an extraordinary part of the day, I worry less about that," she said. "As long as [the cat]'s not eating it."

If a cat is eating plastic or anything else that isn't food, that's called pica, and it's a problem. If the cat ingests nonedible items, they can become lodged in a cat's intestines and require expensive surgeries to be removed. If not treated, these blockages can be fatal.

If your cat eats any nonfood items, you should bring it to the vet, both experts recommended. And if you don't get the treatment you're looking for, consider consulting a behavior specialist, Tynes said.

"The saddest thing for me," she said, "is the clients I've seen who maybe have spent, you know, thousands of dollars on multiple surgeries to remove things from their cat," instead of working to address the problem in the cat's behavior.

When a cat with pica is brought to the vet, first they are tested for any other possible gastrointestinal issues, like parasites. Once the problem is determined to be behavioral, there are a few possible treatments.

Dodman said some vets can prescribe medication similar to human treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorder, like Prozac. Owners can also distract their cats when they are engaging in undesirable behaviors, and provide more toys and other activities for the cats to play with instead. Tynes suggested growing some cat grass or buying a dog chew toy for a cat to eat instead of harmful plastic.

It's also important to remember that your cat doesn't know it's doing anything wrong, Tynes emphasized. Don't blame your feline friend for licking your grocery bag. Just pay attention, and talk to a vet if it becomes a problem.

Incredibly rare footage has captured a mother snow leopard and her three cubs trudging through thick snow in the mountains of northern Pakistan.

Sakhawat Ali, a gamekeeper at the Central Karakoram National Park in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, spotted the elusive animals on March 13 in a remote village called Hushe after two weeks of tracking their pugmarks [pawprints].

"Spotting four snow leopards is a great joy, as it indicates that the snow leopard population is increasing," Ali told Live Science.

Snow leopards (Panthera uncia) are an elusive species of big cat that can be found in mountainous areas across 12 countries in Central and Eastern Asia, and sightings are exceedingly rare. Their white coats render them almost invisible against the snowy mountains they call home, and more than 70% of their habitat remains unexplored, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Since late February, Ali said he had been noticing snow leopard pugmarks around the village. "While I was on the roof of my house, I used binoculars to observe the mountains and spotted a female snow leopard along with her four cubs," he said. "I quickly moved closer and filmed them from a distance of about 250 meters [820 feet]."

Related: 50 of the most endangered species on the planet

Snow leopards are usually solo travellers, so seeing four together is exceedingly rare.

"In the village [of Hushe] we are used to seeing snow leopards, but nobody, not even the elders that I spoke to, have ever seen four snow leopards in one go," Ali told CNN.

Female snow leopards typically have between one and five cubs with each litter, according to WWF. At three months old, the cubs begin to follow their mother out of their dens to learn how to hunt in their environment. However, they stay with their mothers until they are almost 2-years-old, according to San Diego Zoo.

The big cats are considered vulnerable to extinction, with only 4,000 to 6,000 individuals left worldwide, according to WWF estimates.

The Baltistan Wildlife Conservation and Development Organization (BWCDO), which shared Ali's video on Facebook, said the sighting was a positive sign of successful conservation efforts in the Hushe Valley area. However, the species still faces numerous threats.

According to the United Nations Environment Program, poaching, habitat fragmentation, prey depletion and climate change all threaten the snow leopard's existence.

When a cat sniffs something, it sometimes adopts a strange facial expression, seemingly shocked by the smell of a stinky object.

So why do cats really make this weird "stink face?" Turns out it has nothing to do with unpleasant odors — it's actually a sign that they're analyzing chemical signals in their environment.

Many animals, including wild and domestic cats, release pheromones — chemical signals used for communication between members of the same species. To detect and decipher these invisible messages, our feline friends rely on a special sensory organ in the roof of their mouths called the vomeronasal organ or "Jacobson's organ."

This organ is separate from the olfactory system (i.e. the nose), which detects odors but not pheromones, Alex Taylor, cat wellbeing and behavior advisor at International Cat Care, told Live Science in an email.

When a cat encounters pheromones, it processes them differently from odors. The cat instinctively opens its mouth slightly, lips curled back, displaying a behavior called the "Flehmen response." This expression makes it easier for pheromone molecules to reach the vomeronasal organ, enhancing the cat's ability to sense important chemical cues.

"This can look like the cat is grimacing, but there is no emotional aspect to this behaviour – the cat is just detecting and processing pheromones," Taylor said.

Related: Why do cats 'chatter'?

Cats use pheromones to communicate various messages: they can use them to mark territory without engaging in fighting or to strengthen the bond between mothers and kittens, Taylor explained. Pheromones also convey information about sexual status, indicating when a cat is in heat, said Mikel Delgado, a senior research scientist at Purdue University Veterinary College of Medicine in Indiana.

Pheromones are secreted by specialized glands located in multiple areas around a cat's body, including the chin, cheeks, the space between eyes and ears, edges of the lips, base of the tail, around the genitals and anus, between the paws and between the teats, Taylor said.

When cats rub their faces on furniture, scratch surfaces, spray urine or defecate, they leave behind chemical messages for other cats, Delgado told Live Science in an email. Later, other cats use their vomeronasal organ to analyze these scent marks and gather information about their feline neighbors.

During the Flehmen response, pheromone molecules enter a cat's mouth — either through licking or inhalation — and dissolve in saliva. They then travel through two passages in the roof of the mouth, known as the nasopalatine ducts, which lead to the pair of fluid-filled sacs that make up the vomeronasal organ, Taylor said.

When pheromone molecules reach the vomeronasal organ, they trigger nerve signals that travel to specific areas of the brain, namely the amygdala region of the hypothalamus and a region that controls sexual, feeding and social behaviors, Taylor said. In this way, chemical cues picked up by the vomeronasal organ directly influence a cat's behavior.

Unlike odors, the meaning of which is learned and can change with new experiences, pheromones trigger instinctive responses. A cat doesn't need to "learn" what a pheromone means — the knowledge is hardwired into its biology, Taylor said. While responses to pheromones are automatic, they can still be influenced by factors such as a cat’s development, surroundings, past experiences, and internal state like hormone levels, according to a review published in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A.

The vomeronasal organ isn't unique to cats. A range of animals, everything from rodents to reptiles, also use this second sense of smell to detect pheromones.

"The advantage of the Jacobson's organ is that animals can detect a wider range of molecules in the environment than animals lacking that organ," Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Live Science in an email.

"Dogs are famous for their keen sense of smell, but that refers to their capabilities in their nasal passage," Losos said. "Cats have three times as many different types of scent detectors in the Jacobson's organ as dogs, which leads some experts to suggest that, overall, cat sense of smell may be comparable to that of dogs."

An evolutionary remnant of the vomeronasal organ, is even found in humans within the nasal septum, but there's no strong evidence that this vestigial version plays a role in chemical communication today.

For cats however, the vomeronasal organ is a powerful tool that enables them to interpret important social information in their environment. To quote Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott: "Cats are a mysterious kind of folk. There is more passing in their minds than we are aware of."

From their tiny noses to their fluffy tails, there's a lot to love about cats. Many feline aficionados' favorite part about their furry friends' appearance might be their "toe beans" — the soft, round cushions on a cat's feet, also called paw pads. Nicknamed for their resemblance to actual beans, these little pads are the subject of countless cute cat videos, and the internet even has whole forums dedicated to them.

But why do cats have toe beans? The answer traces back to millions of years of evolution.

"The question, in some sense, isn't why cats have toe beans," Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of "The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa" (Viking, 2023), told Live Science. He said most members of Carnivora — the taxonomic order that includes cats, dogs, wolves, bears, raccoons and otters — also have paw pads in some form or another. Therefore, the real question is why all of those animals have paw pads.

Losos said paw pads probably evolved about 50 million years ago, when Carnivora first emerged. "It's a long-held trait, and I suspect, for the most part, that all of them have it for the same purpose," he said.

Paw pads serve a few important functions in cats and their Carnivora cousins. The first is to help with running, jumping and landing softly. Most importantly, Losos said, they act as a sort of shock absorber; highly specialized toe beans are one reason cats can fall from great heights without sustaining severe injuries.

Related: How do cats land on their feet?

The insides of cats' toe beans are made of fat tissue bound to collagen, which gives them their squishy, bouncy feel and helps absorb shock waves from impact. One study that examined the structure of domestic cats' paw pads found that they become stiffer as they compress, which helps cushion a landing. The researchers also observed that on a cellular level, paw pads are filled with ellipse-shaped pockets of fat that absorb energy and prevent instability when the cat is landing.

Feline toe beans are so good at cushioning falls that some scientists studied them to create better footwear for paratroopers. The researchers mimicked the fat-filled structure of the paw pads to 3D print shoe soles that helped soften high falls.

In addition to providing a soft surface to land on, toe beans help with agility by providing traction. Without paw pads, cats, dogs and other members of Carnivora would slip and slide around on their furry feet. And just like human fingers, paw pads are supersensitive. Amy Shojai, a certified animal behavior consultant and pet care author, told Live Science in an email that cats detect small temperature differences through their toe beans and that the area is highly attuned to different textures.

Toe beans are also one of the only places on a cat's body with sweat glands, and the same holds true for most other members of Carnivora. "You may notice damp paw prints when your cat feels unduly stressed," Shojai said. This paw pad sweat can help regulate their body temperature a bit, but cats mostly rely on licking themselves to stay cool.

Shojai explained that the rainbow of potential paw pad colors is mostly a reflection of each cat's fur color, caused by the amount of melanin in the area. In general, darker fur corresponds with black or brown toe beans, and lighter fur corresponds with pink toe beans. Similarly, multicolored cats might have multicolored toe beans.

Shojai says it's a good idea for pet owners to keep an eye on the toe beans of their feline friends. Because toe beans serve such vital functions for cats, problems like changes in color, swelling or extreme dryness are valid reasons for a trip to the vet.

All in all, the science shows that toe beans are a feat of evolution, honed over millions of years to optimize cats' ability to hunt and survive. And on top of that? "They certainly are adorable," Losos said.

Wildlife officials in Florida have captured and collared the heaviest Florida panther ever recorded. The panther — an adult male — weighed 166 pounds (75 kilograms), officials from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) said in a Facebook post on Monday (Feb. 10).

The feline was sedated and then released during a routine population check, social media posts show.

Male Florida panthers (Puma concolor coryi) typically weigh between 100 and 160 pounds (45 to 73 kg), while females weigh 70 to 100 pounds (32 to 45 kg), according to the FWC.

Pictures show the animal perching on a tree branch and lying on the ground while biologists performed a health check. "When collaring a panther, biologists conduct a comprehensive health assessment that includes blood tests and collecting tissue samples for genetic analysis," officials wrote in the Facebook post.

Related: Florida alligator weighing over 900 pounds could have been 90 years old when caught

Florida panthers are an endangered subspecies of cougar. Their range historically extended from the sunshine state to Louisiana and Arkansas, but hunting over the past centuries has decimated their population. Nowadays, Florida panthers are only found in southwest Florida, where they live in wetlands, swamps, upland forests and stands of saw palmetto, according to the National Wildlife Federation (NWF).

Although Florida panthers are the sunshine state's official animal mascot, only 120 to 230 of them remain in the wild, according to the FWC.

In this latest catch and release, officials fitted the panther with a GPS collar, which will enable researchers to track how it survives and reproduces in its remaining habitat. "The effort is part of a long-term research program that monitors panther movements, health and population dynamics," they wrote in the Facebook post. "This project provides essential data for conservation efforts on the endangered Florida panther."

Officials did not say where exactly they captured the panther, but the location was revealed as being Babcock Ranch near Fort Myers by the local broadcaster WINK News.

FWC officials urged anyone who spots a panther to report the sighting via the Florida panther program website. Florida residents who wish to support the program can purchase a "protect the panther" license plate, according to the Facebook post.

Researchers in China have found the remains of a cat that was so small it could have nestled in the palm of your hand. The fossils were discovered deep within a cave where early humans lived.

The pocket-size feline is a newfound species, Prionailurus kurteni, which the scientists described in a study published Nov. 19, 2024 in the journal Annales Zoologici Fennici. The researchers believe that the extinct animal, which could date as far back as 300,000 years, may be the smallest cat ever found.

The newly identified species is part of the leopard cat genus Prionailurus, a family of wild cats that still exists today in South Asia. While most modern-day leopard cats are closer in size to domestic cats — which reach average lengths of 28 inches (70 centimeters) and weigh at least 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) — the new species was more diminutive.

"This cat is clearly smaller than a domestic cat. It is comparable to the smallest living cat, [at around] 1 kilogram [2.2 pounds]," lead author Qigao Jiangzuo, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, told Live Science.

Related: 35,000-year-old saber-toothed kitten with preserved whiskers pulled from permafrost in Siberia

Today, the smallest living wild cat species are the black-footed cat (Felis nigripes) and the rusty-spotted cat (Prionailurus rubiginosus), which are about 13.7 to 20.4 inches (35 to 52 cm) and 13.7 to 18.9 inches (35 to 48 cm) long respectively. Based on the newfound species' fossilized remains, the researchers estimated that the extinct feline was roughly the same size, or possibly smaller, than both the modern-day species, estimating that it measured between 13.7 and 19.7 inches (50 cm), Jiangzuo said.

Clues to the life and size of this miniature feline came from a single, fossilized fragment of its lower jawbone, complete with two teeth, which was discovered in a palaeontological hotspot in eastern China called Hualongdong Cave.

"Cats are common elements in the Quaternary [the geological period that spans from 2.58 million years ago until today] deposit of caves. However, finding such a small cat is a surprise," Jiangzuo said.

Fossilized remains of leopard cat ancestors are rare, because these animals tend to live in unsheltered forest environments where their bones degrade more quickly, meaning few prehistoric specimens have survived. But in the protective environment of the cave, the bones of the recently discovered specimen were preserved, giving the researchers a unique opportunity to examine them.

The prehistoric leopard cat may have wandered into the cave in pursuit of rats and mice that may have been feeding on food scraps left behind by early human inhabitants that once lived in Hualongdong Cave, the researchers told the South China Morning Post.

The inclined angle of one of the mini cat's teeth also connects the prehistoric leopard cat to the common ancestor of domestic cats and a species called the Pallas's cat (Otocolobus manul). While it was already known that leopard cats share heritage with these other species, the Hualongdong Cave findings provide the first fossil evidence of that link.

According to the study, the leopard cat family is the most diverse cat genus in the southern and southeastern forests of Asia, with five living species spread across the region. The cave specimen adds valuable detail to this family history: "The new species for the first time reveals the past diversity of this genus," Jianghuo said.

This has given the researchers new data with which to investigate the origins of all cats, he added. "We plan to systematically survey the fossil cats in China and around the world, which were not well studied in the past. We hope to trace the origins and past diversity of the cat family."

Compared with other animals, human babies start out with a lot to learn. Whereas some animals walk within hours of being born or hatching, human babies take months or years to master even the most basic functions. If you've ever had a baby and a pet at the same time, you might have wondered which one is smarter.

So what does science say about how the intelligence of human children compares with that of our fur babies? It's a complex question, and the answer depends on the dimension of intelligence, the animal, and the person you ask.

How smart are dogs compared with babies?

Stanley Coren, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia, has spent his career investigating dog intelligence. He adapted a psychological measure called mental age to test dogs' cognitive abilities.

While it's not possible to draw an exact comparison between dog and human intelligence, Coren said dogs do have some cognitive skills, such as vocabulary and counting, that roughly correspond to those of young toddlers. For example, the average dog can understand about 165 words and signals. In exceptional cases, some dogs can learn significantly more. For example, Chaser the border collie, who was specially trained by a retired psychology professor, was reported to understand over 1,000 words.

Most dogs can also "count" up to three, Coren said. If the idea of a dog being able to count sounds unlikely to you, try this: Show your dog three treats, hide them all in your hand, and then give the dog only two. Most dogs will know one treat is still missing and nuzzle your hand to try finding it. And in the lab, studies show that dogs' brains light up similarly to humans' as they see the number of dots on a screen change, suggesting they recognize when a quantity goes up or down.

Coren added that trained retrievers, which are bred to fetch downed birds or other game, often keep track of five or more objects in order while hunting. So, even though dogs can't recite "one, two, three," like a preschooler might, these sorts of behaviors show that many dogs have some intrinsic understanding of basic counting. In comparison, research shows that 14- and 18-month old human infants are already able to distinguish between two and four objects when an adult counts them.

By analyzing these sorts of cognitive functions, you can estimate the "mental age" of dogs on a human scale, Coren said. "We basically found out that the average dog has a mental age which is about the equivalent of a 2-and-a-half-year-old child," at least when it comes to certain cognitive skills such as vocabulary, counting and emotional awareness, he told Live Science. He said for different dogs, the number can range from about age 2 to 3.

Related: Are dogs smarter than wolves?

Keeping that mental age in mind can help dog owners understand their dogs' capabilities, Coren said. For example, just as 2-year-olds aren't yet fully capable of experiencing and comprehending guilt, dogs aren't, either; the shy behavior exhibited by dogs after misbehaving is actually just the fear of punishment, Coren said.

It's important to note that dogs' intelligence is highly dependent on their breed, experience and training. For example, border collies and poodles generally rank as more intelligent than Chihuahuas and bulldogs. There's also the caveat that these tests don't account for different breeds' unique, instinctive skills, such as herding or scent tracking, which are their own forms of intelligence but are difficult to compare to human cognition.

"Dogs are not four-footed people in fur coats," Coren said.

How smart are cats versus babies?

The research on domestic cat intelligence is less plentiful, but some studies have probed the cognitive abilities of cats. "We might look at things like problem-solving or innovation/behavioral flexibility as kind of a substitute for an intelligence test," Jennifer Vonk, a professor of psychology at Oakland University in Michigan, told Live Science in an email.

The landmark research on cat intelligence, conducted by Edward Thorndike in 1898, examined cats' ability to free themselves from a box by pulling a door open. Although the cats were able to open the door only through trial and error at first, the time it took them to escape the boxes generally decreased as Thorndike repeated the trials, showing that the cats were able to learn. Subsequent studies that used treats in puzzle boxes found that cats could learn new solutions when the puzzle box changed, which demonstrated cats' ability to adapt flexibly to new learning environments, Vonk said. And while it would be unethical to put human babies in a puzzle box, kids can begin escaping cribs as young as 16 months of age.

Other research has evaluated cats' memory, which is another important dimension of cognition. Studies have found that cats strategically search for food based on just a single memory, for example. Studies also show that cats grasp the concept of object permanence — the understanding that an object still exists even if it is no longer visible. Human babies usually learn object permanence between 4 and 10 months of age. And a recent study found that cats may even be better at associating words with pictures than human toddlers are.

But even though it's possible to quantify aspects of cat intelligence with these tests, Vonk doesn't think it makes sense to view cat intelligence through the lens of human development.

"I don't think it is relevant to compare animal abilities to those of human children because other species are not just developmentally delayed humans," she said. "They have evolved to solve different problems because they evolved in different ecological contexts and live in different environments."

These different evolutionary pressures have made cats excel at skills such as hunting and differentiating scents. "They are probably far more efficient hunters than most humans will ever be," Vonk said.

Ultimately, cats' unique adaptations also mean they simply may not be motivated to perform well on intelligence measures the way humans are. Over history, human survival has been dependent on tasks such as tool building and language development. Other animals haven't had the same evolutionary pressures — for example, cats rely on their sense of smell and physical coordination to hunt, rather than their ability to communicate or build tools — so Vonk believes it just doesn't work to compare cats with young humans.

"I think you cannot think about animals as being comparable to humans at different stages of development," Vonk said. "That's a comparison I try very hard to never make. We have to think about what abilities make sense for cats to have and understand why cats do well at the things they do well at, and worry less about comparing them to humans."

Leopards, cheetahs, Egyptian maus — a variety of cats have stunning spots. Others, like tigers, have stripes; still others, like lions, lack patterns on their coats. But how do cats get their spots, specifically?

Scientists don't have a complete answer to this question, but they've uncovered many clues.

"We don't know why some cats have spots and some cats have stripes," Dr. Greg Barsh, a professor emeritus of genetics and pediatrics at Stanford University, told Live Science. But researchers have identified two genes that affect the size and shape of spots — as well as stripes — in both domestic cats and wild felines.

Domestic cats with one or two normal copies of a gene called Taqpep have stripes, Barsh and colleagues reported in a 2012 paper published in the journal Science. But according to this same paper, as Live Science previously reported, cats with mutations in both copies of this gene (one from their mother and one from their father) have fur that is blotched or whorled.

These Taqpep mutations give rise to the patterns of the classic tabby cat, Leslie Lyons, a cat geneticist at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine, told Live Science.

Related: Is it safe for cats to drink milk?

Taqpep mutations can also modify spots — at least in cheetahs. Cheetahs are known for having black spots on a yellowish-tan background. But "king cheetahs" — which have mutations in both copies of the Taqpep gene, according to the 2012 Science paper — have large, blotchy spots. Along the spine, the blotches align themselves into stripes.

Although spotted domestic cats are obviously not striped, they appear to have a normal version of Taqpep, according to Eduardo Eizirik, a professor of genetics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. As part of a study published in the journal Genetics in 2010, he mated a spotted domestic cat with a blotched one.

Eizirik and his colleagues concluded that the spotted cat he started with — an Egyptian mau — must have had a normal Taqpep gene, because some of its descendants had stripes. The team also surmised that one or more other genes in the spotted cat had the effect of breaking up the stripes that Taqpep would normally cause and turning them into spots. It's still unclear what those other genes are, he said.

Another gene that seems to affect spotting is Dkk4, according to Barsh. The Abyssinian breed of domestic cat has one or two mutated copies of the Dkk4 gene. Its coat, at a glance, appears to be a solid brown or cinnamon color. Another way to view it, however, is as a coat peppered with tiny black spots, Barsh said.

Servals are wild felines with large spots, and they have two normal copies of Dkk4. Therefore, if you cross an Abyssinian cat with a serval, as has been done, some of the offspring inherit one normal copy and one mutant copy of Dkk4, Barsh explained. These offspring have spots that are larger and sparser than the peppered spots on the Abyssinian parent but smaller and more numerous than those of the serval parent.

"This is a very clear example of how the [Dkk4] gene can affect the number and the size of spots on the animal," Barsh said.

Although mutations in Taqpep and Dkk4 can modify spots and stripes, these genes do not by themselves control whether cats have spots or stripes in the first place. A tiger with a normal Taqpep gene has stripes, while a cheetah with a normal Taqpep gene has spots, Barsh said. While mutations in Taqpep can make a cheetah's spots become blotchy, the spots don't turn into stripes.

And as Eizirik's work showed, domestic cats with a normal Taqpep gene can be either striped or spotted. "There must be something else yet, a third gene, that is helping to create those spots," Lyons said.

Garfield, star of the eponymous comic strip created by Jim Davis in 1978, is, like many of the cats that roam our homes, orange. He is orange in the same way that some people are redheaded, some horses are brown, or some dogs are Irish setters, but there is one important difference.

For all other animals, including redheaded humans, we know what causes this characteristic color, but surprisingly, we didn't know what causes it in cats — and felines in general — until now.

Two papers have just been published on bioRxiv — one of the most popular pre-publication repositories of unreviewed articles — that explain the genetics behind orange cats. One comes from Greg Barsh's lab at Stanford University, California. The other is from Hiroyuki Sasaki's lab at Kyushu University, Japan.

Eumelanin and feomelanin: the two mammal pigments

Mammals have only two pigments, which are two colors of melanin: eumelanin (dark brown, blackish) and pheomelanin (yellowish, reddish or orange). Redheads only produce pheomelanin, while dark-skinned people accumulate mainly eumelanin. All other skin and hair colors fall somewhere in between, thanks to as many as 700 genes that regulate pigmentation in animals.

In primates, horses, rodents, dogs, cows and many other animals, melanin production and the decision to produce eumelanin or pheomelanin is in the hands of a membrane protein called MC1R. This controls the skin cells known as melanocytes that release melanin. If a melanocyte-stimulating hormone (alpha-MSH) is released, melanocytes start producing eumelanin. If an antagonist, such as agouti-signaling protein or beta-defensin in dogs, comes into play, the production of dark eumelanin stops, and melanocytes produce orange pheomelanin instead.

However, cats are another matter altogether. Anyone who keeps a cat around the house knows that they are very peculiar animals, very special in every way, and this extends to their pigmentation.

Related: Over 40% of pet cats play fetch — but scientists aren't quite sure why

In cats, eumelanin or pheomelanin production is not controlled by the MC1R receptor. Instead, it is in the hands of a locus (whose gene was, until now, unknown) called "orange". A locus is a physical location in the genome whose effects are known (e. g. black or orange coat), but not the details of the precise DNA sequence it contains, nor the gene to which it belongs.

For this reason, we usually first identify the locus and then, over time, we discover and describe the associated gene in detail. The orange locus in cats can come in two versions: an 'O' variant that supports the production of pheomelanin (orange), and an 'o' variant that is responsible for producing eumelanin (black).

One detail to note is that the orange locus is on the X chromosome. Female cats are XX and male cats are XY, like all other mammals. And as with all female mammals, all cells throughout development will randomly inactivate one of the two copies of the X chromosome. Oo female cats — carrying the O variant on one X chromosome and the o variant on the other — will generate areas of their body that are orange (in areas where they have inactivated the 'o' allele) and others that are black (when inactivating the 'O' allele).

This means that when we see a bicolor (black/orange) or tricolor (black/orange/white) cat, or one of its more diluted versions, we know that it must be a female, and its pigmentation pattern will be completely unique.

Male cats are either orange or black (they have only one X chromosome), but cannot be bicolored or tricolored, unless they carry a chromosomal alteration equivalent to Klinefelter's syndrome in humans (where males are born with an extra X chromosome).

Calico cats

Females can therefore have the unique mosaic patterns so prized by cat lovers. When coinciding with another mutation that affects the proliferation and differentiation of melanocytes (producing white patches, without pigmentation), this generates a tricolor cat, commonly known as a calico.

Each calico is unique, as the inactivation of one of the X chromosomes in each pigment cell occurs randomly during development. The earlier this inactivation occurs during development, the larger the resulting spot. The later it occurs, the smaller the spots.

The feline orange coat gene

Until now, we did not know which gene was hidden behind the orange locus in felines. Barsh and Sasaki's recent work has identified that it is not the cat homologue of MC1R, but a different one: the Arhgap36 gene. Male cats with orange coats, as well as the orange spots of calico cats, carry a mutation in this gene that blocks the production of eumelanin and allows the production of pheomelanin.

These two studies are a wonderful example of good, basic, solid research, which only aims to satisfy scientific curiosity without knowing its immediate applications, and to understand, in this case, why that naughty cat Garfield is orange.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

You may have noticed that your cat's tail moves in all sorts of ways, from quivering in an upright position, to swishing from side to side, to being held down close to the ground. But besides using their tails to maintain their balance and control their movements, do cats' tails reveal anything about their state of mind? And what do the tail movements mean?

Feline behavior experts agree that cats use their tails as part of a broader system of body language to communicate a wide range of emotions. Cats rely on their eyes, ears, body and tail to express fear, anger, joy, contentment and curiosity, according to research published in the Irish Veterinary Journal.

A cat's tail is remarkably flexible, thanks to its unique anatomy. It consists of 18 to 23 small bones, known as caudal vertebrae, which interlock like a chain, enabling the tail to move in many directions. When a cat experiences an emotion, its brain sends signals to muscles in the tail through the pudendal nerve, or the nerve that connects tail muscles to the central nervous system. "This communication occurs almost instantaneously, allowing cats to move their tails with lightning speed and precision," Reda Mohamed, a lecturer in animal anatomy at Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine, told Live Science in an email.

An upward-pointing tail signals a friendly, social approach, said Mikel Delgado, an animal behaviorist at Purdue University in Indiana.

However, the upward-pointing tail isn't universal. A doctoral study on communication in domesticated and wild cats found that while wild cats displayed many of the same social behaviors as domestic cats, they did not use the "tail up" signal commonly seen in domestic cats during friendly interactions. This suggests that the "tail up" signal likely developed during the process of domestication.

Related: Why do cats 'chatter'?

A quivering tail often indicates excitement, Delgado said.

Meanwhile, "a puffed-up tail is often a response to a threat — such as seeing a cat outdoors — and is assumed to be a defensive attempt to make themselves appear bigger," Delgado explained. This reaction is similar to what humans experience when they get goosebumps in response to fear. Humans have tiny muscles called arrector pili at the base of our hair follicles, and when we're scared, these muscles contract, causing our hairs to stand on end. Similarly, cats have the same muscles at the base of their tails, and when they feel threatened, these muscles cause their tail to puff up, making them look larger and more intimidating.

"A lowered tail ['tail down'] is generally associated with fear, as the cat tries to make itself smaller or protect itself," Delgado said.

A fearful cat may also keep their tail tucked under or wrapped around its body, according to a guide to feline emotions published in 2021. And if a cat slaps their tail against the ground or moves it rapidly from side to side or up and down, it may be a sign that they are feeling angry.

Interpreting a cat's emotional state from its tail may seem simple, but context is also crucial.

"It's important to remember that you can't know how a cat is feeling by looking at just one part of their body," Delgado told Live Science in an email. "You always have to consider the cat's entire body as well as what is happening in the cat's environment."

Additionally, cats may communicate with their tails in distinct ways depending on whether they are interacting with humans or other cats.

For example, a 2021 study in the journal Animals found that when cats interact with each other, they usually keep their tails down and rely more on their ears to express how they're feeling. (Erect ears signal friendliness, while flattened ears indicate hostility.) Meanwhile, when approaching humans, cats often hold up their tails, especially before rubbing against their legs, the researchers observed.

The next time you're with your cat, take a moment to notice what they're trying to tell you using their tail.

Mountain lions are prowling Greater Los Angeles at night to avoid humans exercising on their mountains, a new study finds.

The human population of Greater Los Angeles is increasingly using mountain lion (Puma concolor) territory for recreational activities such as hiking, running and cycling. That puts the mountain lions in a tough spot — so they're changing their behavior.

Mountain lions, also known as pumas or cougars, are naturally most active during dusk and dawn, but in places where humans engage in recreational activities, the cats now favor nighttime hours, according to the study, published Nov. 15 in the journal Biological Conservation.

"This flexibility we see in mountain lion activity is what allows us to share these natural areas together," study lead author Ellie Bolas, a doctoral candidate studying mountain lions and mule deer at the University of California, Davis, said in a statement. "Mountain lions are doing the work so that coexistence can happen."

Related: 1st of its kind footage shows guard dogs saving sheep from puma attack on a pitch black mountain

Bolas and her colleagues fitted GPS collars to 22 mountain lions living in and around the Santa Monica Mountains between 2011 and 2018. They then compared mountain lions' activity with human recreational activity registered on the online platform Strava, which enables users to track their physical exercise.

The researchers found that mountain lions living in areas with increased recreational activity shifted the timing of their activities from dawn to night — when human activity was at its lowest, according to the study. This suggests they adapted to avoid people.

These findings are consistent with previous studies that suggest mammals across the world are becoming more nocturnal in response to human activities, and that predators like mountain lions will go out of their way to avoid humans.

A 2019 study published in the journal Ecology Letters found that the sound of humans talking was enough to scare away mountain lions and reduce their activity — to the point that our voices had a similar effect to removing the predators from the ecosystem altogether. Humans have historically persecuted mountain lions, so this fear of our species is well-earned.

Today, mountain lions living around Los Angeles face many threats, including busy roads, wildfires, rodenticide exposure, low genetic diversity and fragmented habitat, according to the statement. The study authors noted that our recreational activities are another potential stressor for the cats.

"Even something as innocuous as recreation can add to these other stressors we're bringing into their lives, potentially by altering the amount of energy they have to expend for hunting and other needs," Bolas said. "But we can feel a sense of optimism that they are flexible in the timing of their activity. Coexistence is happening, and it's in large part because of what mountain lions are doing."

Cats perform better than toddlers on a simple measure of language comprehension. The research, published Oct. 4 in the journal Scientific Reports, revealed that cats form associations between pictures and words around four times faster than human toddlers do.

Language is the most important tool humans use to communicate. But the ability to comprehend speech is not unique to Homo sapiens. Some apes associate spoken words with written symbols or pictures, while African gray parrots can understand and respond to spoken instructions. Dogs, meanwhile, have been trained to understand and respond to simple vocabulary.

However, we know far less about humans' other major companion, cats. "Cats can definitely recognize the sound of words coming from people, and more and more studies prove that cats rely on interaction with humans in problem-solving," Dr. Carlo Siracusa, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Pennsylvania, told Live Science. There is even limited evidence that cats can respond to pointing, and research in the past five years has shown that cats can recognize not only their own names but also those of familiar humans and animals. But can they associate words and objects more generally?

Related: Over 40% of pet cats play fetch — but scientists aren't quite sure why

To test this theory, Saho Takagi and her team at Azabu University in Japan gave 31 adult cats a simple word game used to investigate the same ability in babies. The cats were shown two nine-second cartoon clips with recordings of their owners repeating a made-up word over each image. The sequence of clips — a red sun labeled "paramo" and a blue unicorn with the word "keraru" — was repeated until the cats appeared to get bored and paid 50% less attention to the screen.

After a short break, the image clips were repeated, but this time, half of the pairings were inverted. The switched clips visibly confused the cats, with recordings of "paramo" alongside the unicorn and "keraru" with the sun holding feline interest an average of 15% longer. That the cats noticed this change and were clearly perplexed by it is good evidence that they had formed a link between the words and images, Takagi and colleagues wrote in the study.

"Some cats even gazed at the screen with their pupils dilated during the 'switched' condition," Takagi told Science magazine. "It was cute to see how seriously they participated in the experiment."

The experiment revealed that the cats were able to learn the combinations from just two nine-second exposures — significantly faster than toddlers, who required at least four 20-second trials.

However, these comparisons should not be overinterpreted. "You're comparing an adult animal with an immature animal from a different species," Siracusa told Live Science. "In addition, we humans are interpreting the behavior of a completely different species. When we interpret children's behavior, we are interpreting the behavior of our same species, which we are programmed by natural selection to perceive in an innate way."

Comparison with other domestic species, such as dogs, is possibly more useful, Siracusa said. But it's still vital to consider their key evolutionary differences, he added. Siracusa said the research team developed a reasonable and effective method to study the question, especially given the difficulty of studying cats.

However, by their very nature, cognitive studies have limitations that are important to bear in mind when interpreting the results. "A certain number of the cats have to be excluded, so there's already a bias —not a fault of the research," he said. "It's just difficult to engage animals." Despite its limitations, the study does show that cats are capable of forming picture-word associations, the team wrote in the paper, although whether this is an innate ability or a product of domestication remains a mystery.

Archaeologists in Jerusalem have discovered a 1,200-year-old jug fragment with the imprint of a small cat "making biscuits," the oldest evidence of a kitty kneading on record.

The team suspects the cat left its paw print when a potter left the freshly made jug to dry in the sun before firing it in a kiln. The jug's surface would have still been moist and malleable for a time, in perfect condition to immortalize a feline passerby.

"We think the cat was kneading rather than just resting on the jug because its claws were extended and left deep marks in the clay surface," Shimon Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who co-directed the Mount Zion excavation that revealed the finding, told Live Science in an email.

Gretchen Cotter, the laboratory director, noticed the markings on the pottery fragment during post-excavation work. The shape of the small imprint, which includes a part of the cat's front leg, suggests that the feline had laid on the edge of the jug, perhaps to sunbathe. The paw print is 1.2 inches by 1.2 inches (3 by 3 centimeters) while the portion of the arm is 0.8 inches by 0.4 inches (2 by 1 cm).

Related link: Why do cats 'chatter'?

"We can only [imagine] that it was purring as it soaked up the Jerusalem sun," the archaeologists said in a statement Gibson emailed to Live Science.

Cats knead for various reasons. As kittens they rhythmically tread their paws on the mother's body to stimulate the flow of milk. Adults cats also knead, particularly when they're with someone who makes them feel safe, as they likely associate this behavior with the comfort they felt as nursing kittens. It's also thought that kneading may help cats leave their scent.

The jug with the kneading mark would have been used to carry liquids such as water, wine, and olive oil in domestic settings, Gibson said. It was recovered from the site of an ancient residential quarter near the summit of traditional Mount Zion (the south-western hill, as opposed to the City of David on the south-eastern hill, which was also called "Zion" in the Iron Age and Persian periods). There, the archaeologists had reliably identified other pottery from the Abbasid period (A.D. 750 to 1258), which allowed them to date the jug fragment to roughly the ninth century, Gibson explained.

That means that the cat lived during the Abbasid Caliphate, the dynasty that ousted the previous Umayyads to rule over large swaths of the Islamic Empire. During this period, Jerusalem was under Islamic rule, but its inhabitants also included Jews and Christians, according to Gibson — and, clearly, cats.

Cat remains have been found in Israel dating back to prehistoric times, and they held a special significance in Islamic culture during the Abbasid period, Gibson said. They "are mentioned in early Islamic sources, including Hadith literature, and the Prophet Mohammed was said to have had a great fondness for cats," he added.

In general, markings on ancient pottery — including from birds, foliage or critters like lizards and snakes — are common, with the most frequent imprint being fingerprints. "Paw prints exist in abundance, but not with evidence of claws and kneading," Gibson said.

At the Mount Zion site, the archaeologists also identified many small fingerprints on pottery fragments that likely belonged to the potter's children, who were often responsible for adding jar handles.

For now, the jug fragment with the cat print has been processed, and will soon be turned over to the Israeli authorities, who will decide what to do with it.

Imagine it's a crisp and sunny fall morning. You just left your local coffee shop, ready to start your day.

Out of the corner of your eye, you catch a glimpse of something moving in the bushes. Is it a squirrel stashing acorns for the winter? A robin fattening up for migration? As you get closer, the image becomes clear and you unconsciously hold your breath.

It's a black cat out for its morning stroll.

You pause for a second to decide your next move. Cross the street so the cat can't cross your path? Muster the courage to walk past it, or even crouch down to pet it? Rationally, you know the idea that a black cat is bad luck is just a silly superstition … but you have an important meeting this afternoon and don't want to jinx it.

This superstition about black cats and other black animals in general has shaped people's preferences about animals. It's left its mark on things such as lower adoption rates for black cats and beliefs that black cats are more aggressive. Yet, these biases are unfounded.

As two biologists who focus on human-wildlife interactions, what we find scary is how superstitions, lore and myths can shape your subconscious — particularly biases toward the animals people are trying to conserve and protect.

Related: World's only known albino giant anteater appears to be thriving in the wild, photos show

Rarity of a solely black or white animal

Of course, animal fur, feathers and scales come in various colors across the visible and invisible-to-humans spectrum. These colorations play a significant role in the survival of wildlife by functioning as a form of concealment, temperature regulation or communication. In white-tailed deer, for instance, a flash of a white tail can indicate danger is near, while the sharp red breast of a male cardinal attracts females that are ready to mate.

Within species, color variations are found throughout the animal kingdom, including melanistic animals with more dark pigmentation and leucistic animals with a reduction of pigment. There are black panthers, a melanistic version of a leopard, Panthera pardus, or jaguar, Panthera onca. On the other side of the spectrum are white spirit bears, a leucistic version of an American black bear, Ursus americanus. There are also albino animals that lack most or all pigment.

Scientists recognize these color variations as extreme abnormalities within the natural world. Being all black or all white is a rare phenomenon, unlikely to persist in the wild because it's a selective disadvantage. These animals often have a tougher time blending into their habitat — a challenge for predators trying to ambush their prey, and for prey trying to conceal themselves from predators. They may also struggle to regulate their temperature and to communicate with others in their species.

A suite of genes that can change in many ways is behind this rainbow of wildlife coloration. One of the most well-known and studied genes is MC1R. In animals, loss-of-function mutations in the MC1R gene can result in light, yellow or reddish coat color. In humans, redheads have up to five loss-of-function mutations in MC1R, leading to hair that ranges from strawberry blonde to copper.

Protection based on unique color

Recently, we explored how charismatic coloring, including melanistic and leucistic or albinism coloration, affects the conservation of animals in the United States. As we read through local laws and found news stories of wildlife being protected or culled, we noticed a trend: Many albinistic and leucistic animals are protected.

Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin laws protect albino/white deer from being hunted. In Marionville, Missouri, white squirrels are protected and given the right-of-way on all public streets, with a penalty of up to US$500 or 90 days in jail for failing to abide by the law. In Louisiana, it's prohibited to take white alligators from the wild, with a fine of at least $10,000 and six months in jail. The World Wilderness Congress recently adopted a resolution: Making Space to Protect White Animals, Messengers of Peace.

We also found white animals readily celebrated. Brevard, North Carolina, hosts a yearly festival called "White Squirrel Weekend." People often release white doves at weddings and funerals as symbols of purity and peace. The California Academy of Sciences' famous albino alligator named Claude has a whole book written about him. And members of the Olney, Illinois, police department wear a patch on their uniform with a white squirrel.

We found similar laws and celebrations do not exist in these jurisdictions for the white animals' melanistic/black counterparts. We did identify a few cities and schools, including Marysville, Kansas, and Goshen College, that made the black squirrel their mascot.

This discrepancy surprised us because the genetic mutation that causes melanism occurs less frequently than the one that causes albinism/leucism. Pure black animals are more novel. We thought the more rare melanistic animals would pique human interest for being more unusual and trigger more protections.

Colors have long-standing associations

For many thousands of years, people have shared with each other stories, lore, tales and myths that attempt to explain the world.

Sometimes these stories provide cautionary advice about the dangers that lurk around us. As our early ancestors sat around fires, telling thrilling stories, they sought refuge together from the darkness that concealed looming threats. The partiality evident in our history can linger for significant periods of time, making it difficult to unlearn.

Many human biases developed as a survival response — one reason a darkly colored nocturnal predator would be fearsome is that it's so hard to see at night, for instance. Modern preconceptions, though, can be based on harmful ideologies. Somewhere, way back when, white became synonymous with "good" and "pure," while black aligned more with "evil" and "unclean." And even now these unconscious affiliations influence how people celebrate and protect — or not — rare animals.

Perhaps more chilling than a black cat darting past you is the thought of how much in your subconscious mind goes unquestioned. Ideologies — whether detrimental or benign — permeate human society, influencing people's perceptions of reality and informing how they interact with the world.

This Halloween, rather than the spooky proposition of goblins and ghouls, consider whether the more horrifying specters are the unacknowledged and dangerous biases we humans possess.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scientists have uncovered new insights into the diet of the infamous Tsavo man-eating lions after analyzing clumps of hair found in the predators' teeth.

In 1898, a pair of male lions (Panthera leo) killed and devoured dozens of workers constructing a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya — killing at least 35 people. They stalked and terrorized the workers for nine months before being shot later that year. Since then, their bodies have been kept at the Field museum of Natural History in Chicago.

In a new study, scientists extracted the DNA from clumps of hair found in the lions' teeth.

Their findings identified six prey species, which raises new questions about the lions' distribution in Kenya at the time they were alive.

"We found mitochondrial genetic material from giraffe, human, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest and zebra as prey, and also identified hair that came from the lions themselves," study co-author Alida de Flamingh, a biologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science in an email. The researchers published their findings Friday (Oct. 11) in the journal Current Biology.

Related link: 'All it takes is a predator to learn that children are easier prey': Why India's 'wolf' attacks may not be what they seem

They conducted a genomic analysis on the hair, extracting mitochondrial DNA from four individual strands and three hair clumps. They then compared the genetic profiles to a list of potential prey species, created from previous research, to identify which species the lions may have hunted during their lifetime.

"One surprising finding was the identification of hair from wildebeest," de Flamingh said. According to the researchers, the lions would have had to travel 56 miles (90 kilometers) to get to the closest grazing area of wildebeest (Connochaetes), which raises questions about the range of land covered by the Tsavo lions. "It suggests that the Tsavo lions may have either traveled farther than previously believed, or that wildebeest were present in the Tsavo region during that time," de Flamingh explained.

The Tsavo lions were seen across the workers campsite that stretched eight miles (13 kilometers) of Tsavo National Park, east of mount Kilimanjaro. The size of a lion's territory can range from 20 to 400 square miles (50 to 1,000 square kilometers), depending on the availability of prey and water. Where prey is sparse, lions will venture further to find another resource.

In the study, the researchers note that the two lions abandoned the area for several months between the attacks and it is possible that during this time they could have traveled to a more productive environment, where prey availability was higher and where wildebeest were present.

Researchers also said the absence of buffalo DNA was unexpected. Previous research from 2015 had identified a single buffalo hair from one of the lions but the metagenomic analysis in this study did not identify buffalo hair.

African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) are among the major prey animals for lions in the Tsavo region. According to the study, these two Tsavo lions may not have preyed on African buffalo because of an infectious viral disease called rinderpest that spread among split-hooved animals in the region, reducing the buffalo population. "The entry of rinderpest into Africa in the 1890s killed ~90% of cattle and had similar impacts on buffalo," De Flamingh said.

Scientists still aren't sure exactly why the Tsavo lions hunted humans.

Although some reports suggest these lions consumed up to 135 humans, a stable isotope analysis of the hair and bone of the Tsavo lions found that they ate around 35 humans which equates to around 35% of the diet of one lion and around 13% of the second, according to a 2017 study.

One theory suggests that the rinderpest epidemic contributed to the lions' human-eating habit because the population of buffalo and cattle had collapsed.

Another theory suggests that this behavior may have started because of painful dental injuries found in the jaws of the two lions, which would have made catching large prey very difficult.

De Flamingh describes the layers of hair found in the Tsavo lions' jaws as a timeline into the history of what they ate leading up to their attacks. Further analyses could enable scientists to trace changes in the lions' diet over time and potentially shed light on when and why humans were their target.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 10:38 a.m. ET on Dec. 15, 2025 to note that Tsavo lions may not have preyed on African buffalo because a disease dramatically reduced the buffalo population, not wildebeest as was previously mentioned.