Big Cats FAQ

By Batian



 
 
 
 

You will find here many questions and aswers about big cats. Most of them have been asked by people who found the Furry Lair with a question in their minds.
If you have any questions which aren't on this FAQ, Batian, the expert in cats and big cats will immediately answer to them and this FAQ will be completed. So, don't hesitate, ask what you ever wanted to know about these fantastic animals! Click here to do that!!! You can also use this address to congratulate him!!!

Questions summary

  • What were you studying ?
  • Why cats use to play with mice and other preys, without eating them, because it looks like a cruel game for many people...
  • Who was top predator, or most dominant predator, lions or sabertooths? How was the predator hierarchy in Eurasia in Pleistocene times? Was it like this (top represents most dominant) : Lions - saber-tooths - bears(larger types) - hyenas - hunting dogs - leopards / jaguars - cheetahs
  • In a real fight between a lion and a tiger, who would win the fight and between them 2 who is the strongest?
  • How many chromosomes does a Leopard have?
  • Is it true that Leopard and Panther is exactly the same thing?
  • What's exactly the difference between a leopard and a jaguar?
  • Is Amur tiger the same subspecies as Siberian tiger?
  • Is that right that the Puma has many different names?
  • What does the lion's paw pads look like and how big dose the tiger paw pads get?
  • When a big cat rests, it usually put the rear paws together on a side, bot not always. Why?
  • What about cat's dominant paws ?
  • Is it true that big cats don't purr, but they emit a sound like that ?
  • What about spots on the young lions' fur?
  • What about the genetic mutations that affects fur's pattern to big cats?
  • Is it true that a white tiger is produced through inbreeding and that is why we see more in captive and few in the wild?
  • Why do many people call White tigers Siberian tigers when they are Bengal tigers that had a genetic mutation?
  • I know that only Bengal Tigers can be white from that genetic mutation, but can some siberian tigers become whitish for a camouflage in the snow?
  • What range eye color can big cats have?
  • I've been told that tigers are more attracted by red balls to play... But white tigers prefer blue balls... I know they have different color of eyes... is that related?
  • How do leopards mate?
  • What do you think about the text telling what big cats feel during mating ?
  • What do you think about the modern methods to maintain big cats population, like electroejaculation ?
  • Does inbreeding occurs among big cats ?
  • Is it true that male lions and female tigers sometimes mate and the product  of this union is called a Liger?
  • Can a panther and a cheetah mate and produce an offspring?
  • At what age does the male puma become adult? I mean, what is the age of puberty?
  • Does homosexuality among lions and other big cats has been observed?
  • What's difference between extension and erection ?
  • What's the size of a lion's penis?
  • Do lions have spines on their penises?
  • Is that right that big cats (and most mammals) have a bone in their penises?
  • Is that true that tom lions lick lioness' labia? Or a lioness licks her labia, or a lion licks his penis?
  • Do female lick the male's tiger penis?

    • Q. What were you studying ?

        A. One of the things I was studying at the time I took most of my lion videos was why lions couple so much more than other cats, yet the female seems so less fertile. My first clue came when over the first two years of my study I noticed that lions seldom mate with the fury and passion of other cats. My second clue came when I recognised the social nature of lions - they are, after all, the only truly social cat - and recalled similar sexual responses amonst other social creatures such as primates (including humans). In lions, sex is more for bonding and friendship that for making little lions. So the lioness is not as much a reflexive ovulator as other cats, where the spines on the male's penis excite his female upon withdrawal and trigger the release of ova (egg cells) for fertilisation. To confirm my hypothesis, I tried taking tight closeups with a special teleconvertor lens every time the zoo lions mated - most were unsuccessful, but several seemed to show the startling fact that tom lions (males) do not have penile spines at all. In summary, lions mate more often for social reasons, and the lioness is not always stimulated by mating.
        But about then I was kicked out of the zoo for being a "pervert" (most scientific discoveries are rife with public misunderstanding) and I stopped my research. But I still have some of the videos.
        The moral seems to be that the study, for whatever reason, of animal genitals must be practised with caution, because most people are too afraid of their own "down there" area to accept the much more natural sexuality of animals. I am not a "pervert" if I am taking video shots of copulating animals in the frame of scientific interest.
     

    Q. Why cats use to play with mice and other preys, without eating them, because it looks like a cruel game for many people...

        A. I've heard a lot of ideas on this one, ranging from the prosaic to the mystic, and no one explanation seems any better than another. Some popular reasons are:-

    1. Domestic cats seldom learn from their mothers how to hunt properly because the mother herself is too well fed by her humans to need to hunt much.
    2. Prey that doesn't move is boring, so the cat moves it around to make it interesting again.
    3. Cats cannot see stationary prey, so when the mouse stops moving - from exhaustion, shock, blood loss, whatever - it becomes invisible to the cat. Only when it moves again does the cat see it again, and pounce.
    4. Cats regard us humans as kittens that never grew up, because they never see us hunting for our dinner. Accordingly, they try to teach us to hunt the way they would their kittens - by bringing home live, stunned prey so we can practice on it. (I love this explanation - it came from a personal friend as a matter of fact, and it's so cute! But I think it the least probable simply becasue I believe cats regard us as super-cats because we're so much bigger than them.)
    5. Because humans keep playing the screwed-up-bit-of-paper-onna-string game with cats, cats see injured mice and birds as just another screwed-up-bit-of-paper-onna-string.
    6. An English folk tale I once read tells how the mice once saved the life of a cat. In a perfect parallel of Aesop's fable re. lion and mouse, and C S Lewis's Aslan and Reepicheep in "Prince Caspian", the cat agreed thenceforth never to kill mice ever again, but only to play with them as friends. Trouble is, the cat's meaning of the word "play" was misinterpreted by the mice - after all, cats "play" with claws and teeth, don't they?
    7. Cats are not interested in the suffering of their prey, only in making the kill. Lions suffocate zebra (a horrible way to go - I nearly suffocated once, myself); African hunting dogs kill their prey by disembowelling it on the run; domestic cats take hours to despatch a bird or mouse. Humans view this as terrible, referring to our programmed feeling of ethics and sympathy. But remember that Nature has its safety mechanisms: usually the prey is in shock, its brain numbed by the final surge of beta endorphins, and it often simply waits, quite peacefully, for the end. As victim of a bad motor accident, I can vouch for this: it usually looks worse than it feels.
     

    Q. Who was top predator, or most dominant predator, lions or sabertooths? How was the predator hierarchy in Eurasia in Pleistocene times? Was it like this (top represents most dominant) : Lions - saber-tooths - bears(larger types) - hyenas - hunting dogs - leopards / jaguars - cheetahs ?

        A. My off-the-cuff reply is that lions came AFTER the so-called sabretooths; there are several different types of sabertooth (ie, big cats with protruding upper canines), some of which, like Smilodon fatalis, lived in North America, others, like the marsupial lion Thylacoleo (sic?), in Australasia. The marsupial lion had soft folds or pouches in the lower jaw into which the exaggerated upper canines fitted when the mouth was closed, presumably to stop him from accidentaly stabbing himself in the chest whenever he sat down. Smilodon,by the way, is the ubiquitous sabretoothed cat: skeletons were found in solidified tar pits at La Brear, California, by workmen throwing across a new highway. Apparently Smilodon was too stupid to stay away from liquid tar pits when they bubbled away during the Pleistocene, whereas the cats that later became cougars seemed to have had more brains: fewer of them were found anywhere near such hazards to health. The Eurasian sabretooth was very big, but (again, I'm working from memory here, so forgive my errors!) had surprisingly slender canines which were probably used not for stabbing its victims (or itself, by accident) but for inserting between the prey's neck vertebrae and severing the spinal cord within. Some lions kill in this way today. Unfortunately, long slim teeth break easily and this cat, who I think was called Nimravidus, died out wiffout its teef.

        The lion as we know it (Panthera leo) seems to have put in its first appearance around 12,000 years ago in the caves of Germany and France. Skeletons indicate this animal could be almost twice the size of a modern African lion. Because it didn't keep breaking its teeth it probably survived well enough to bump Nimravidus off its throne, and around about the time human history starts the so-called giant cave lion (Panthera leo spelea) had developed a smaller, forest-dwelling contemporary which travelled down through the heavy woodlands of North Africa and later became P l massaicus, the modern East African lion. Now, of course, the forests of North Africa have vanished and become deserts, and the Masai lion has been forced to evolve into a social cat able to survive its new habitat by communal female hunting; but when those females have cubs, you can still see evidence of their forest heritage in those beautiful little spotted coats.

        So your list only partly makes sense - who was king of the predators in Pleistocene Eurasia really depends on which part of the Pleistocene epoch you consider. A time machine taking you back to the early Lower Pleistocene (600-500 thousand years ago) would show you the sabretoothed Nimravidae enthusiastically breaking one tooth after another on their prey; going forward to the Upper Pleistocene (50-10 thousandyears ago) would display giant cave lions, against which other creaturessuch as wolves and even bears would have little chance in competition.Bosstiger specifically mentioned the Eurasian fauna; other cats he mentioned such as jaguars and cougars were strictly New World entrants tothe race. (I've read somewhere that cougars, or pumas, are genetically ac lose relative of the cheetah, diversifying in some inexplicable mysterysome 10,000 years ago.) Tigers and leopards evolved from a core animal that existed alongside P L spelea - I can't recall this core animal's name right now, but doubtless it was spotted for close-forest camouflage, and when some of these creatures ventured into new Asian woodlands, which are more "open", they became lots bigger and the spots melded into stripes.

      BTW, I have recently thought of a notion that the huge size of P l spelea, the giant cave lion (qv Jean Auel's splendid "Valley of the Horses") has re-occured in the enormous sizes that male ligers grow to. Ligers have a lion father and a tigress mother, and male ligers in particular seem to tap a hidden heritage wich makes them literally the biggest cat in the world: almost twice the size and weight of a full-grown lion. I've seen photos of these incredible but very gentle creatures, which can weigh up to half a tonne and measure more than three metres from nose to tail. Perhaps something in the tigress's recessive genes allow the lion father's genes to express that long-dormant requirement of size.
     

    Q. In a real fight between a lion and a tiger, who would win the fight and between them 2 who is the strongest?

        A. The question is academic, of course, as lions and tigers do not meet in the wild - they live in different habitats. Also, big cats tend to adopt the Kung Fu philosophy that having tremendous weapons means never use them, otherwise mutual annihilation will be assured. Having put that aside, the question can be answered two ways: 1. in a fight between a tom (male) lion and a tiger, the lion would probably win; 2. in a fight between a lioness and a tiger, the tiger would probably win. Lions are socail animals and the tasks of running the pride are divided between male and female - the toms do the fighting, the lionesses do the hunting. This is why lions alone among cats are so sexually dimorphic (the body size and shape is different between male and female). The tom lion is big and bulky with powerful forelegs and a deep chest containing massive lungs; his throat and shoulders are protected by the mane, and his whole psyche, his spirit, is geared towards fighting. As a hunter he's a dismal failure, because he's too big and heavy and as zoologist Goerge Schaller pointed out, a hunting tom lion looks like a haystack on the move with his bouffant mane. The lioness, on the other paw - the female - is sleek and slim, lean and muscular, a perfect supple body for slinking silently after her prey and bringing it down in the final chase. But as a fighter she lacks the tom's greater strength, muslce bulk, and stamina. She has no mane to protect her vulnerable throat, and with smaller lungs and heart she tires quicker than the male.

    In tigers, there is no social structure, therefore no division of labour between the genders. Each tiger lives or dies on his, or her, own - toms and tigresses both hunt and fight when necessary. So the tiger's body of both male and female is a compromise between the hunter and the warrior - and coincidentally midway between the specialist fighter of the tom lion, stronger and more capable than the tiger, and the lighter, less warlike lioness who could not match a tiger in a fight.

    Naturally, this is not to say that a tom lion would invariably win against a tiger of either sex, or a lioness never win. It's up to the individual animals, their personal strengths and weaknesses, experience or lack of, mental attitude, and health. there is also the fact that tom lions tend to fight mainly with the front claws only, while standing on the hind legs, whereas tigers of both genders are able to fight on the back with all four paws going. This would give the tiger a slight advantage.

    Also, I would not define such a battle as won or lost when one animal kills the other - as stated before, cats tend to win battles in a "cold war" of bluff and threat, counter-bluff and counter-threat, during which one cat would recognise the strength or weakness of the other and hostilities would end with no blood. But in a full-scale, all-out, four-paws-and-teeth fight tom lions would have the advantage over tigers, and tigers would have the upper paw on lionesses.
     

    Q. How many chromosomes does a Leopard have?

        A. Leopards, like all cats, have 19 pairs of haploid chromosomes including the two "sex" chromosomes (X and Y). This means, of course, that the diploid number is 38, but usualy for clarity biologists reckon by the haploid number (the number of pairs in the somatic cells, or body cells, and the number of single chromosomes in the gametes or sex cells). Remember that the somatic cells and the sex cells reproduce by different methods - the former uses mitosis, and the latter uses meiosis. For this reason it's standard to number the chromosomes by somatic pairs.
     

    Q. Is it true that Leopard and Panther is exactly the same thing ?

        A. The so-called "black panther" is really just a leopard with black fur. They behave like leopards, because that's what they are. The black fur (melanism) is caused by the recessive "bb" gene, and so it can occur in any sample at a 1:3 ratio. In other words, from any mating where the "b" allele is present (even in normal spotted leopards!) you could in theory have three spotted cubs and one black cub in the same litter, to the same parents. This is like the fact that I have fair hair, and my sister has dark hair. The Asian subspecies of black leopard seems to be the only one with the "b" allele - black leopards in Africa are almost unheard of.
        Blacks leopards seem a little smaller that spotted ones, and when I was at Singapore Zoo many years ago, when they had a huge cage full of blacks and spotteds together, I noticed the two colours tended to stay apart. In Auckland Zoo I watched their two black leopards mating over a five-day period - predictably their behaviour and even the characteristic sound of the male at climax ("uh-uh-uh-uhaaooww!") was identical to normal spotted leopards. It was a series of dull days, and the sultry winter light added an air of mystique to the animals, making them perhaps the most beautiful animals I've ever seen. At times all I could see of them was two black cat-shapes slinking through the murk, and the occaisional pair of fierce green eyes that turned to look at me with my camera.

        Pedantically, I NEVER use the term "black panther" as it's ambiguous - it could mean a black leopard, or  a black jaguar, or even a black puma, all of which exist. George Adamson (of "Born Free" fame) once wrote that he had heard of a legendary " . . . black lion, which must have looked awesome".
        The term "panther" is loosely used to described just about ANY big cat - even tigers and lions, which are all members of the Latin genus Panthera . Most people use the term "black panther" to describe a black leopard, I think, largely because of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book". Another useless piece of information about the names we give big cats is that once upon a time the word for a lion was "leo", that for a leopard was "pard", and that for a cheetah was, confusingly, "leopard".

        The story goes that the animal we now call a cheetah was once supposed, by serious zoologists, to be the result of a mating between a lion ("leo") and a leopard ("pard"). Latin being the dominant language of religion and science, the two words were combined to make the cheetah a "leo-pard". Much later, it was realised that such a mating is impossible, and the cheetah is actually a separate animal altogether.     But the name stuck, and it didn't help that cheetahs and leopards look alike. Confusion reigned, with debates raging about whether it was a pard, a leopard, or a cheetah.

        Finally it was decided to give the cheetah its own new name - from the Hindi "chita", meaning "spotted one", what was originally called a pard was stuck with its new name of "leopard", and the "leo", as science shifted from academic Latin to popular French, was renamed "Lion". So, if you read any anient bestiary texts, especially in the original Greek or Latin, bear in mind that a "leo" is a lion, a "leopard" is a cheetah, and a "pard" is a leopard!
     

    Q. What's exactly the difference between a leopard and a jaguar?

        A. About 12,000 km! Leopards live in forests, jungles, plains, and savannahs throughout most of Africa and large parts of India and the Middle East. Jaguars live in the tropical rainforests of northern South America and parts of Central America. The remarkable thing is that despite the geographical distances, these two cats look so alike that even experts get fooled, sometimes. (Uh, yeah, even me!!)

        The leopard (Panthera pardus) is a medium-weight cat with a slim, triangular head and a lithe body. The coat pattern is rosettes - rings of spots - on the body and often a beautiful "necklace" of spots around the throat. The spots are often blurred into the background fur. The jaguar (Panthera onca) is a bigger cat with a more rounded head, especially in males, and a stocky, powerful body. The coat pattern is filled rosettes - big rings of spots with one or more spots inside, on the body, and there is no necklace. The bigger spots of a jaguar often have clean-cut margins where the background fur surrounds them.

        Behaviourally, there is little difference between one and the other - both are intelligent, opportunist hunters, happily eating anything from insects and mice to gazelles (leopards) and peccaries (jaguars), and even nuts and fruits if there's nothing else; they're solitary except during the brief breeding season; females have 2-4 cubs per litter; and even most of the sounds they make are similar. But the leopard is more arboreal - he regularly climbs trees, and even stores his kills there to keep it from hyaenas and lions, and the jaguar is a water-lover, often splashing around and catching fish in pools and streams of the rainforest, where the leopard seldom intentionally gets himself wet.

        The puzzle is posed, then - why does the leopard still exist in such a huge range of the world, while the jaguar is confined only to bits of the Amazon and a solitary reserve in Belize? I think the answer is that the leopard is more adaptable, able to live in many different places from thick forests and woodlands to the open East African savannah and even the Middle Eastern semi-deserts, and seems to have little fear of man - stories abound in modern Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, of the beautiful spotted cats regularly skulking around rubbish bins like dogs and even raiding bins of leftover food from the elite Nairobi restaraunts. I've never heard of a jaguar doing that. One might say that leopards are the cool, streetwise members of the cat family, tough survivalists wearing sunnies while driving open-top Trans Ams and listening to Daft Punk, while jaguars are the gentle arty-crafty types who stay at home and listen to Bach's Das Woltempierte Klavier and wouldn't even know if the world came to an end.

        By the way, being both Panthera cats, jags and leops can interbreed in zoos, even the "ready to mate" signals between male and female are identical, but the cubs produced are usually sterile and cannot, in thei turn, have cubs. Jaguar/leopard crosses are called, delightfully, "jaguleps".
     

    Q. Is Amur tiger the same subspecies as Siberian tiger?

        A. Yep, the one and the same. The animal's scientific name is Panthera tigris altaica; the older nomenclature used to be Panthera tigris longipilis , refering to the big cat's beautiful, long fur. It was once found all over Northern Russia, including Siberia, but (the usual story again, I regret) human habitation has squeezed it into the less-populated Amur Valley region of the East where the last individuals are being hunted by poachers with dogs and guns.

    With scientific names a certain protocol is used: the first name, denoting the genus, is always headed with a capital letter; the second name, denoting the species, is always written in lowercase. If there is a third name (altaica or whatever), that denotes the subspecies and is also always in lowercase. All 3 names - genus, species, and subspecies, are also written or typed in italics . Why this is so, I haven't a clue; it's just one of those unbroken traditions of biologists the world over.

    It was the Swedish naturalist Carl Linne who invented the system of scientific names in the 18th century; in those days the language of science was Latin, so Linne (who Latinised his own name to Linnaeus) used this language in the creation of the names used. Thus lion is leo, honeybee is mellifera, human is sapiens (Latin for self-awareness), etc. The system actually works right back to the Kingdom the living thing belongs to - Animalia, Plantae, Monera, etc - so describing the full scientific name of, say, a Siberian tiger neatly traces its ancestry and evolution as well as telling you a lot about the animal. The Siberian tiger's full scientific name is thus:-
         Kingdom: Animalia (it's an animal, not a plant, fungus, or unicellular organism)
         Phylum: Chordata (it has a spinal cord, unlike worms, insects, molluscs, etc)
         Class: Mammalia (it is a fur-covered, milk-gland equipped mammal, unlike other chordates such as frogs, fish, lizards, or birds)
         Order: Carnivora (it is one of those mammals that eats meat on land, as distinct from antelope, rhinos, elephants, mice, bats, monkeys, dolphins, etc)
         Family: Felidae (it is a cat-like carnivore, unlike dogs, hyaenas, stoats, raccoons, bears, or pandas)
         Genus: Panthera (it is a big cat, not a small cat)
         Species: tigris (it is a tiger, not a lion, leopard, or jaguar)
         Subspecies: altaica (it is that kind of tiger with long fur that lives in the Amur valley)
     

    Q. Is that right that the Puma has many different names?

        A. Probably no big cat has more names than Felis concolor. Because of its range - from the Rockies and plains of North America to the forests of South America - different peoples have given it a lot of different tags. Because most North Americans call it cougar, and the world media is dominated by the USA, its most common name is cougar - a name, apparently, derived from a Cherokee word. But a lot of scientists use its other common name - puma, corrupted from the language of the ancient Incas in South America. If you want to be pedantic and scientific, you'd call it a puma. If you want to be hip and real American, you'd call it a cougar. Below is a list I've compiled of other names for this beautiful cat. Cat-a-mountain, an English name shortened to Catamount; Mountain Cat; Screamer (even its friendly "hello" sounds like a Skilsaw going through two feet of corrugated iron); Panther, or Panther-Cat; Painter (the Mid-West version of "Panther" with diphthongs); Mountain Lion - the early Dutch immigrants though they were looking at maneless lionesses; American Lion - they finally realised it's a different animal to the African lion; and finally, its formal Latin name Felis concolor. This last proves an odd point. For ages the cougar was assumed, because of its size (some are bigger than a cheetah), to be of the Pantherine persuasion. But experts began pointing out things such as the close-in nostrils and the pointy ears. It took the magic of molecular genetics to solve the mystery: the cougar shares more genetics in common with domestic tabbies than lions, tigers, jaguars, etc. - it's not a Panthera creature at all, but merely a very big Felis.
     

    Q. When a big cat rests, it usually put the rear paws together on a side, bot not always. Why?

        A. It's a matter of comfort, really. Big cats and small cats often sit-lie in what Serengeti zoologist Brian C R Bertram delightfully calls Tail-end Lying, Front Sphinxed (TLFS). The front legs stretch out in front, but the rear of the body is twisted slightly so the animal rests one flank on the ground with both hind legs to the same side, one hind leg slightly forward of the other, and the head turned to face the same direction as the hind paws. The fact this is such a popular pose suggests to me it is extremely comfortable - and versatile as the animal can, from TLFS, either roll onto the brisket to become truly Sphinxed (a more alert pose) or can simply flop onto his side (the same side as whichever flank is on the ground) and go to sleep. It's also a great pose to do most of the bulk washing, including both forepaws, the upper hind leg and haunch, the stomach, and, by merely lifting one leg, the loins and genitals. The only disadvantage seems to be in lions trying to roar. I suppose that because the torso is twisted some 80-90 degrees lions cannot get total lung capacity, so if a lion starts roaring while TLFS, I've noticed he nearly always stands up if he decides he wants to get MORE POWER in his ROAR.

        By the way, when I was in London I saw the magnificent statues from ancient Egypt in the British Museum, including the lion and sphinx statues. True to form the Sphinxes were all lying, well, Sphinxed - on the brisket, hind legs tucked under in parallel.
    To the ancient Egyptians this symbolised strength, alertness (guarding), and perfection, and this is why their lion and Sphinx statues and bas-reliefs tend to show this rather stylised pose. But a lovely pair of red granite statues in the Museum showed they also had an appreciation for real lions - these two, flanking a doorway, were lying TLFS in a much more natural pose, their regal maneless heads turned to look at you with surprisingly friendly eyes, and one forepaw casually draped over the other.
     

    Q. What does the lion's paw pads look like and how big dose the tiger paw pads get?

        A. Briefly, the pads of all big cats resemble those of small cats (eg domestic cats). Except, of course, they are a lot bigger. A lion’s spade-shaped paw is bigger than a man’s hand; the metacarpal pad (the big triangle at the back of the paw) is the size of your own palm, and the four oval toe pads are bigger than your fingers. They feel soft, dry, warm, and rough there is nothing I can compare the touch of a lion’s paw pads with. They have sweat glands – the only part of the cat’s body to have sweat glands, apart from around the nose and genitals – and a nervous or excited lion has a distinct damp feel to his pads. The pads of a cheetah, by the way, are ridged – all cats have three lobes to the metacarpal pad, and these lobes are bounded by ridges that help the animal grip and steer while running, like the treads on a runner’s shoes.
     

    Q. What about cat's dominant paws ?

        A. By "dominant" I am assuming you mean whether an animal uses the right or left paw (hand/hoof/talon/tentacle) for manipulating objects or the left. The vast majority of humans (I think it's about 80%) are right-handed. There is a higher percentage of right-handed men than women, and about 3% (at my educated guessitmate) are ambidexterous, able to use either hand with equal ease. (I have actually trained myself to become ambidexterous, partly as a scientific experiment, and partly to improve my technique at the piano.)

        Hand dominance in humans is very much swayed toward this right-handed percentage in humans alone because we have speech. This may seem a strange connection - but speech is generated by the left side of the brain, in an area called Broca's Area located in the temporal lobe. This puts it right next to that part of the premotor cortex that controls hand movement. (The premotor cortex initiates all voluntary muscle movement in the body, which is then controlled by the motor cortex itself.) So there is in fact a strong connection between the ability to speak and movement of the hands, and you only need watch someone talking enthusiastically to realise this. In fact, it's often said that hand movement evolved into speech in early cavemen!

        The left side of the brain controls all the right side of the body (and vice-versa), so it's natural that the speech area - Broca's Area - being on the left side of the brain causes most people to use the right hand more than the left. Other animals cannot speak, so they have no speech area - and thus no bias in dominance. So any individual animal you study will be always left-pawed or right-pawed, but any group of animals studied will show a roughly equal tendency to be a leftie or a rightie.

        I studied this in animals myself ranging from cats and dogs to horses, sheep, lions, and birds, and sure enough one cat will winkle a piece of toast from under the fridge (no comments about my housekeeping, please!) with its left paw, and another with its right; one lioness will always trip her prey with the right paw and her twin sister with the left; one parrot will use the left foot to pick up a biscuit and another the right, and so on. I also studied eye dominance in domestic cats by simply noting which eye they use to peer out of a hole in the cardboard pet carrier I put them in, and soon learned that the same applies here also. I even noticed it in galloping dogs and cheetahs: each time the stride closes the hind legs come forward of the front, and to stop them banging into the front legs the animal twists them slightly to one side or the other :

                                                                                |  |   front legs
                                                                               |  |    hind legs

        Sure enough, dogs running on the beach near my place will twist either to the left or the right - but any selected group of dogs show an even distribution.
     

    Q. Is it true that big cats don't purr, but they emit a sound like that ?

        A. A very common theory! Let me go into Science Professor mode. There are two main genera of cats: the small Felis cats such as Felis serval (serval), F. nigripes (Blackfooted cat), F. catus sylvestris (domestic cat), etc, and the big Panthera  cats, such as Panthera tigris (tiger), P. leo (lion), P. onca (jaguar). The small Felis cats have a throat bone, the hyoid, which supports the larynx (voice box). The big Panthera  cats lack this throat bone, which means the larynx is mounted very loosely in the throat and when the animal uses full power in his voice, the whole larynx vibrates, producing the characteristic roar.

        Lions have an extra feature: as well as the loose, vibrating voice box, there is a horn made of cartilage just above it which acts just like a megaphone - amplifying the sound and making the lion the loudest cat in the world.

        Because the small cats - the Felis genus - have a bone supporting the larynx, it cannot vibrate when the vocal cords inside operate, so the small cats cannot roar like the big cats can. The big cats, however, can miaow like the small cats - although the miaow is much deeper than that of a house cat. I once recorded a Siberian tigress vocalising, and later processed it in my music studio, speeding up the sound until it sounded exactly like the miaow of a Siamese cat! Lions miaow too, of course - the deep "aaoouww" they often make when greeting each other.

        But purring is a different thing. No-one yet really knows how house cats purr. My favourite theory is the "brain oscillator" notion.
    Rapid-firing neurons (brain cells) cause the vocal cords to flutter, which the air flowing in and out of the lungs amplifies. The neurons, in accordance with neural theory, are normally prevented from firing until the upper centers in the cortex relax, whereupon the oscillating neurons start, the vocal cords flutter, and purring results. This explains why small cats purr when they are relaxed, making it a largely subconscious thing, and how they are able to purr while breathing in.

        With big cats, it's different. Because of the lack of the hyoid bone, the vocal cords cannot flutter involuntarily like that. The brain oscillator still exists, but because of the lack of the hyoid bone, it is silent. In fact, big cats DO purr - but in a different way, and for a different reason.
    The last part of what I call the "long snarl" often deepens into a rough growl - the larynx vibrating, again - and female big cats use this purring growl when courting eager males. It is totally conscious, and can only be performed while breathing out as it involves the vocal cords in their normal mode, rather than the flutter of a housecat's purr. One of the most beautiful things I've heard is the soft, deep purr of a female leopard while being mated - this intermittent rrrrrrrrr . . . rrrrrrrrr . . . rrrrrrrrrr with pauses for breath while the male did his thing, until her moment of climax and a deep, harsh growl.

        So big cats do purr - but differently and for different reasons than small cats.
     

    Q. What about spots on the young lions' fur?

        A. Small cubs (a few weeks old) have very prominent spots - dark circular fur markings - that make them look like little leopards. Lions were originally woodland/forest animals - when they first evolved from the early miacids most of Africa was covered in rainforest - and despite that they now live in open savannah they still retain some of their ancient woodland behaviour, and their cubs still have the original spotted camouflage that the adults once had.

        In line with the current fascination with ancient mysteries and the Robert Duval notion that the giant statue of Harmakhis in Egypt - what we called "The Sphinx" - is about 12,000 years old, I propose my rather wild idea that the "Sphinx" was modelled not on today's modern African lions, with the broad chests and splayed forelegs as they crouch, but on an earlier subspecies perhaps related to Panthera leo spelea, the "cave lion", which had a narrower chest and thus probably crouched with its forelegs parallel - as does the Sphinx today. The approximate date for P l spelea - 12,000 years ago!
        A lioness is ready for mating at about 2 years.
        Some have been seen mating - or at least enticing males - at eighteen months, but at this age they're really too emotionally immature to employ the full mating act, and will run away in fright if a male should try and mount. A domestic cat is capable of having kittens at six to nine months of age.
     

    Q. What about the genetic mutations that affects fur's pattern to big cats?

        A. Technically, a mutation occurs when a gene is incorrectly copied from one chromosome to another, during the interphase part of cell division. You'd be astonished at the ingenious mechanisms nature has invented to try and keep the copies accurate, and to rebuild information from damaged genes - rather like Disk First Aid can revive the data lost on a damaged FD. Over 20 different kinds of repair enzymes zip along the DNA helix, "looking" for errors and repairing them. But there's a limit to how effective the mechanisms can work; sometimes the repair enzymes themselves induce errors such as so-called "misalignment" errors caused by DNA clipping, and if both copies of the same gene (remember, each chromosome has 2 identical copies) are corrupted in the same exons then there's very little the genetic repair machinery can work on to recover the lost data.

        In the case of the so-called homeobox genes - the master genes that switch other exons on or off - an unrecovered corruption can produce startling mutations, such as flies with extra pairs of wings or legs where the mouthparts should be, or animals with missing eyes, brains, or limb sections. These homeobox derangements are usually caused by extreme circumstances, like chemicals high in free radicals (eg thalidomide) or high-intensity radiation (UV, X-rays, or gamma rays) which can cause thymine molecules to bind to each other, thus disrupting the DNA sequence. More subtle homeobox defects result in cancer.
        The far more common genetic defects occur in the normal rank-and-file exons that run the cell machinery, and most are barely noticeable unless something in the environment changes to express them. Indeed, I personally believe that these exons are deliberately designed  by nature to go slightly awry, for this is after all what results in you being genetically different from me - a feature needed to prevent infection of an entire species by one single virus, and a process greatly speeded by sexual reprodution, which thoroughly mingles the genes. If the environment changes, those genes that have spontaneously mutated in favour will survive, those that have not, won't.

        The thing to remember here is that genetic mutations are not under tight control - it's very much a case of trial-and-error, and sometimes a gene will change, for the usual spontaneous reasons, to a phenotype neither advantageous nor lethal - it's just different. If nothing in the evironment serves to weed it out of the generations, it'll stay there for no other reason than it's never been "told" to go away. This is where we get such things as black leopards, white tigers, "tabby-gold" tigers, red jaguarundis, and King cheetahs with stripes on the back where they should have spots. (Albinism is a different case, where the gene for melanism is defective on both relevant chromosomes and is not expressed. Albino animals have no colour at all, so the eyes are blue - and usually rather blind, as there's no rhodopsin in the retinae either. Truely white animals have normal coloured eyes and normal vision.) A King cheetah is just as camouflaged as a normal cheetah; black leopards can hunt at night as effectively as a spotted one. White lions and tigers, on the other paw, would soon be weeded out by their blazing coats destroying their ability to stalk prey, and I think it's only human compassion - not to say fascination with the extraordinary - that has kept the "white" gene alive.
     

    Q. Is it true that a white tiger is produced through inbreeding and that is why we see more in captive and few in the wild?

        A. Yes, it is true. The white tiger is produced by two recessive alleles arising from parents containing the gene for whiteness.
    The phenomenon, being controlled by a double-recessive, occurs in a 1:4 ratio of offpring - meaning that one in four cubs of parents who both have the whiteness gene will, themselves, be white. This is a classic case of Mendelian inheritance distribution: 1st-year genetics students, take notes!

         The white tiger is apparently a magnificent specimen - I've never seen one in the flesh, but nevertheless they have creamy-white fur, dark brown stripes, and eyes of a chilling ice-blue. The gene seems linked to that for size, making white tigers larger and heavier than normal orange tigers. Only a very few have been recorded in the wild; the entire stock of white tigers in the world's zoos came from a white tiger captured as a cub in India, Mohan, who was bred to his normal-coloured daughter to produce the characteristic litter of one white and three orange cubs. This is called back-breeding; the daughter's genes are recessive, as are her father's, so the normally hidden whiteness allele comes through. But back-breeding is a form of inbreeding which also produces dangerous conditions such as crossed eyes, hip deformities, swaybacks, and some mental abberations. So the breeding of white tigers in zoos is now strictly controlled. To my knowledge, no white tigers have been seen in the wild since Mohan - natural selection would deal with that, as a white tiger cannot hide and stalk his dinner as well as an orange one.

         White tigers are not albinos. An albino has a different genetic makeup that produces no pigmentation (colouring) at all, and can theoretically occur in any species, including of course humans. Albinos have no melanin in the skin or fur; the pads and nose leather are pink, the eyes are also reddish-pink and sometimes blind or severely sight-impaired, because even the retinae lack the light-sensitive opsins, themselves a protein-based colour pigment.

         There are also the so-called tabby tigers, with fainter stripes and a beautiful golden colour to the normally orange coat. Tabby tigers are produced by the same system of double-recessive genes as white tigers, but by activation of a different gene. Tabbies are very, very rare; none exist in the wild.
     

    Q. Why do many people call White tigers Siberian tigers when they are Bengal tigers that had a genetic mutation?

        A. The explanation is nothing to do with cats, this time. It's to do with people. Siberian tigers have a paler coat than Bengals, and this probably fuels the idea that they are "white tigers". Humans have a habit of filling in an answer they think is right when they're not really sure - I call it the "next best answer situation" - and once they've found that answer the powerful urge to never lose face in front of ones' peers takes over and the person BELIEVES the answer to be right. Faced with a pale-coloured tiger, and having heard of "white tigers", those not in the know make the "next best answer" and then become so sure in their belief they call it such ever after
     

    Q. I know that only Bengal Tigers can be white from that genetic mutation, but can some siberian tigers become whitish for a camouflage in the snow?

        A. The question hinges on your use of the word "become". Many animals - not just tigers, and not just cats - change their fur colouring according to the season. Animals in temperate zones such as weasels become lighter in colour as winter approaches, and polar animals such as the Arctic fox change quite dramatically. The change is entirely automatic, occuring without the animal's will or knowledge, and is a function of the amount of light per day received through the eyes. As less and less light per day is received, the substantia nigra  ("black body") within the brainstem changes its output of melatonin - stimulating hormone. which changes the density of pigment in the animal's skin and fur. A similar mechanism controls moulting during the spring, and the onset and cessation of sexual rhythms.

    So many polar animals, including the Siberian tiger, will change to a lighter colour in the winter - an evolutionary trick to assist its camouflage in the snow. Siberian tigers are generally paler in colour than Bengals anyway; and Sumatrans, from the high tropics, are noticeably darker. Siberians are also bigger, like most polar animals, because a large body has a smaller volume-to-surface area ratio and so radiates less of the body's vital heat.
     

    Q. What range eye color can big cats have?

        A. It's always been a puzzle to me why humans have such variation in eye colour compared to other animals. It seems to be a result of breeding - consider dogs, where you have blue-eyed huskies, and domestic cats, where eye colour varies according to breed from green to yellow, amber, dark orange, and to the startling blue of the Oriental shorthairs. These animals have been cross-bred and back-bred from original wild stock, rather like humans, and I believe this is the reason why only in captive-bred tigers do you get the white tiger with those chilling ice-blue eyes. All white tigers in captivity are descended from one single wild male, captured in India and named Mohan. His white coat and blue eyes proved to be on a recessive gene, so it has taken a lot of skilled breeding with normal tigers to reproduce his unusual look; it's a similar story with the famous white lions of Timbavati in South Africa.

    As a rule the big cats all have eyes that range in colour from a liquid yellow-gold (lions and tigers) to yellow-green (leopards and snow leopards).

    Black leopards and jaguars (panthers) have more green in their eyes which gives them an incredibly supernatural look - almost like green fire in a jet-black face. There is variation amongst individuals - I have seen pale-gold eyed lions and dark yellow eyed lions, and tigers seem to have a generally darker colour tending towards amber. South African author June Kay has written of lions with grey eyes in her book "The Thirteenth Moon", but I have never seen any, or, for that matter, heard of any grey-eyed lions anywhere else. She also mentioned a wild lion with "burnt-orange"eyes.
     

    Q. I've been told that tigers are more attracted by red balls to play... But white tigers prefer blue balls... I know they have different color of eyes... is that related?

        A. Firstly, eye colour in animals bears no relation to their perception of colour - as far as I know. I have blue eyes myself, but I don't think the way I see colour is any different to a human with brown or hazel or green eyes. The protein pigments that colour the iris are not related to those that garner colour sensitivity in the retina. Secondly, experiments on domestic cats (harmless experiments, I'm happy to say, that the cats enjoyed because they got little tidbits to eat) have shown that our little furry friends can distinguish blue and green light but cannot, apparently, see red light. What a strange world it would look like - anything purely red or orange would appear black or grey, the only colours would be blue, green, yellow, violet. But I have to point out that the test results were inconclusive - cats are not overt about telling an experimenter all they see, and for a while it was assumed that cats can't see colour at all! It is possible that cats CAN see red - but choose not to in the experiments. (The human retina contains four light-sensing proteins, or opsins: erythrin, which is sensitive to red light, chlorophyin, green light, cyanin, blue light, and rhodopsin, which combines all colours for extra sensitivity but cannot distinguish one colour from another. You'd think the colour and brightness information are sent to the brain as is - but, rather like a TV camera actually sends blue and green signals only ("chroma") and combines red with luminosity ("luma") to save signal bandwidth, so the retinal cells combine and encode the colour information, deleting the red data and leaving it up to the brain to work out where the red should be. If this doesn't work, we have a red-colourblind man - the most common form of colourblindness in humans - and, possibly, animals that have difficulty seeing anything red.) As it stands at present, I think a tiger would be more attracted to the smell of the ball - perhaps a side-effect of the dye used to colour it - than the colour itself. Careful experiments, which I'd love to try, might prove me happily wrong.
     

    Q. How do leopards mate?

        A. Leopard sex is like any cat sex - full of action and short with it. Lions can take up to several minutes sometimes to go through the act of love, because with them it IS love as well as procreation; but with other cats who are not as social as lions, where procreation is the principal goal, it's literally in-out thanks-a-lot-and-see-ya-next-time! A lucky encounter for a pair of leopards begins when the female, the leopardess, comes on heat and advertises her sudden urge for a bit of nookie by spraying trees with her sex-scented urine and vocalising in loud, penetrating grunts as she prowls her territory. A male's territory will overlap the smaller territories of several females, and when he hears those distinctive low grunts and calls, or happens across a perfumed tree during his regular patrols, all other matters of food, territory, battle, and honour go out of his furry head and he trots along looking for the female who left that invitation. After all, THIS is the reason why he feeds, hunts, fights, defends his honour in the first place . . . so he can win the paw of the fair lady!

    When they meet, however, she is at first no lady. Unless they are already very familiar to each other, she eyes her potential lover with suspicion - not in case he's about to steal her food, but simply because she's actually not quite ready yet. It can take time for a male to respond to her scent and vocal signals, and her actual sexual receptivity only lasts 3-4 days, so her timing must be exquisite. So she plays ahead a little. Now, he must wait until the biology of his female's body swings into gear . . .

    She growls and snarls and rebuffs him with a (usually) sheathed paw. Leopards are arboreal animals and some of this capricious "no, not yet" behaviour takes places high in some tree or other, the female retreating, the male making gentle tentative advances - unlike the aggressive cheetah male who basically just grabs his mate and has his way whether she thinks she's ready or not. It must be frustrating for both of them. When, at long last, she feels the mood is right and her reproductive system is in racing form, she will give him what he has waited so patiently for. The sex act itself is like any cat - male over female, paws on the ground, while she crouches on her stomach with her rump lifted obligingly - but again being arboreal there is variation in location if not actual position.

    On the ground, she will signal her change in mood by rubbing her body against the male in a special way that strokes her flank out across his face, her tail alluringly lifted, and then turns around to do it again. This happens several times. I like to think she's beaing a flirt - teasing him, and bringing him to arousal. Suddenly she crouches on the ground, chin low between her forepaws, haunches kneeling and spread open, and her rear lifted. The male mounts - carefully - from the rear, keeping away from her lethal dental weaponry, and almost immediately crouches over her, holds her nape in his mouth - which stills her just like her mother did when carrying her as a little cub - and as quickly as possible unsheaths his penis and inserts it into her vagina. The act of being straddled and having her nape gripped excites her as much as having her vagina penetrated; there is almost no pelvic thrusting as with other mammals, there just isn't time, because the male has to climax and ejaculate into her before the excitement creates a body-rush within her so intense that she can't help but turn on her lover and attack him. By this time he must be off her back and out of harm's way, unless he wants a leopard's version of a "love-bite"!

    Mating occurs every half-hour or thereabouts, day and night, throughout the leopardess's 3-4 day heat. As I said there are variations of locale - leopards are one of the few cats happy having sex in the trees (the male drops to the ground for safety after covering his female) and those that are not water-shy will even perform the act while swimming, the male gliding up behind the female and straddling her while she treads water, gripping her hips with his hind legs for balance while he mates.
     

    Q. What do you think about the text telling what big cats feel during mating ?

        A. The importance of body language in mating females (tail position, etc), something I'd temporarily forgotten. Because cats of whatever species are so dangerous to each other, and because females are reflex ovulators (meaning in behavioural terms they orgasm extremely violently and tend to "lose control" at the climax), the last thing a tom cat wants to do is climb on top of a tooth-and-claw endowed partner who isn't ready for him. There is no such word as "rape" in the feline vocabulary! This is why courtship in cats is a thing of tentative, and often beautiful, slinking, rubbing, nuzzling, etc - they are testing each other for perfect readiness, and  bringing each other behaviourally into sync. So I agree with a lot of your supplied document - but there are things I wonder about.

        It's a poetic description - but do we really know what the animals feel emotionally, or is this a mere extrapolation of our own human feelings while mating? Male erection is a lot quicker than described, and the text ommitted the fact that there's a difference between erection (where the penis swells with increased blood pressure and volume, becoming stiff for its job of entering the female) and extension , where upon flexing the crucrae muscles the entire glans slides out of its sheath ready to penetrate her vulva. This, by the way, is where even experienced scientists attempting to collect semen from tigers by electroejaculation go wrong. Semen cannot be properly emitted from a sheathed penis! The scrotum draws up significantly as erection comes on, hardening and tightening the testicles (something I had a friendly argument with one so-called big cat expert about!), and I have seldom seen a tom continue thrusting while immersed in his partner. All the hrusting seems to be before intromission, when he's feeling and poking around with his erect penis for the female's entrance. Once in, he crouches there astride her, producing usually one strong jet of semen followed by several weaker ones if he has time (remember that cats mate very briefly because of the female's quick and violent orgasm, so he's got to be in, ejaculate, and get it out before she jumps on him), then withdraws with a climactic yowl. Sometimes he's so quick that he pulls out before he's had a chance to ejaculate his one good shot and I've seen tom lions leaping back with semen spurting into thin air.  Your comment about the spines can be explained, for the most part, by the fact that spine maintenance is a biological function of testosterone level. In other words, just as if you castrate a man he loss his beard and his deep voice, castrating a cat (which is a common practice) makes him lose his penile spines, and he exhibits the smooth penis he had before puberty. Finally, a good veterinary anatomy atlas will confirm that a female cat's vagina is not smooth but ridged inside, to help hold the tom's penis in place against her clitoris.

        Tiger stripes matching up while in coitus is a very old Chinese saying, originally, I believe, referring to wellness in the Chinese family. The Chinese revere the sex act in tigers, despite their own sexual disciplines, simply because tigers mate so often. This has led to the horribly profitable trade in tigers' penises for soup.

        ...You can see my point that it's brief and rough, and the tigress was making the male "build up" his charge by swinging her rump, making it hard for him to enter her at first until she's good and ready. And you can see the way she rolls around afterward - this is to help get the semen into her uterus, where muscular contractions will then pump it up into her fallopian tubes. (That, by the way, cannot happen under anaesthesia - which is why it's notoriously hard to inseminate a female cat the "traditional" way!)
     

    Q. What do you think about the modern methods to maintain big cats population, like electroejaculation ?

        A. I can understand the worldwide need to restore the balance of species, for the sake of beauty as well as prosaic ecological balance. Weneed to live in a world where the biosystems are set up as nature intended, and we need the spiritual presence of animals for our own spiritual well-being - psychological and psychic. I can agree with the scientific need to boost wild tiger populations - as a TWO-STEP process: 1. captive-breed as many genetically diverse tigers as possible; 2. exhaustively rehabilitate offspring of said tigers back into the wild state, given that the wild habitats are safe from exploitation. This is why I am making detailed studies of such unscientific things as Elsa the lioness (Born Free), one of the first great cats to be successfully returned to her wild state. And I can even agree with the need, on occaision, to artificially breed tigers.

        What I deride, however, is the methods mentioned here. Thanks to the sting of 19th century prudery, and coincident fascination with all things technical, semen collection and insemination has to be done to anaesthetised animals using the latest techniques, equipment, and medicines. This to me is as wrong as using a drum machine to take the place of a real drummer in a band.
        I often feel the best way to do something is the way nature intended. We were given live drummers for a reason - a band doesn't sound the same playing  to a machine. Same with animals. Clinically, electroejaculation stimulates all parts of the male reproductive tract simultaneously, rather than the  sequenced muscular contractions of natural ejaculation under spinal control. Result: the only sperm you get from EEJ are those lurking in the dorsal  regions of the tract, which are designed not for insemination but to guard the inseminal sperm from competition with foregin sperm cells should the tigress mate with a second male. The inseminal sperm are never properly ejaculated at all. No wonder it's an effort to artificially breed tigers!

        Worse still, the tigress must be "immobilised" with a relaxant such as Ketamine. This makes her safe to work on - but it  also relaxes her entire reproductive tract, and numbs the vital nerve endings in her vagina and clitoris that trigger ovulation. So the researcher has to  deposit semen far up near her cervix, because she has no muscular contractions to pump it there, and kick her ovulation with large doses of exogenous  gonadotrophins. A complex, messy, and uncertain business. By the way, the feline renal system (kidney dialysis) is highly sensitive to tranquillisers and  relaxants - I've heard it said that every time you anaesthetise a cat to a surgical level, you take six months' life from its kidneys.

        The method I propose is simple and natural - but no-one wants to hear of it, because it's "unethical" (meaning it smacks of sexual perversion  according to accepted religious teachings), and "unscientific" (meaning that it does not employ lots of high-tech gadgets). Using sedation by hypnosis  (which I have proven to work on animals), one collects from the male by hand-stimulation and artificial vagina, then inseminates the female using behavioural stimulation (simulate the male mounting and grabbing her neck) and a suitably shaped pipette on a syringe. The only zoological expert I discussed  this with called me a "crude f***ing pervert" for suggesting that one "jack off a tiger" and not long after that my troubles with the zoological fraternity began.
    *SIGH*

        ...It was in fact research into exactly this that made me think that traditional AI, slanted towards our embrace of technical things and fear of sex, is not only inefficient, it's downright barbaric. The researchers I spoke to (I'm not permitted to tell you who they were or anything about them) used  hand-stimulation of the cheetah's sheath to bring on his erection, and mentioned that after only a few training sessions the cats, when led into the area  where collections were made, never bothered about the food reward but instead got into position for stimulation right away, legs spread and often the penis sliding out erect ready for use. I was also told that the animals were safe to handle, despite their excitement, and the technical quality of the semen they produced far surpassed any that you'd get from electroejaculated cheetahs. I have heard of the same thing being done with pumas (mountain lions, Felis concolour ), servals (Felis serval ), dingoes, tapirs, and a number of domestic species including cats, dogs, and horses. Have you heard of  the "Crump Method" - manual collection from stallions?
        Regarding danger to the humans involved, of course I don't have any first-hand experience, and the only time I've even touched a big cat was always under controlled conditions without food  or females present. But people I've communicated with have all warned that even domestic animals can inflict really serious bodily damage, or death, if improperly handled.
        One adventurous set of zoo keepers decided to try manually stimulating a rhino - end result: a smashed crate, a smashed enclosure, and three staff members who decided that some overdue sick leave was a good option. Moreover, cats are very definite about what areas they will let you touch and what areas they won't - and the latter, along with paws and ears, includes genitals. I am told it takes a bit of habituation to get a male feline used to being handled between his hind legs, and even then if you do it too intensely he can, with no warning at all, turn and flash a nasty bite at your offending hand. One breeder I know of took up my suggestion of calming his stud tom with catnip, which seemed to help - sometimes. And that's domestic moggies I'm talking about!
        I have no doubt that manual stimulation will reap better rewards than current hypertechnical methods, and be much easier on the animal - but first  we must cross the chasm of danger to the collecting human. This is why I'm studying both animal hypnotism and acupuncture/acupressure.

        There are books on the matter, and any responsibility is then soley that of the authors of said books. As to exotic big cats - well, I'm yet to find one publication that deals sensibly with hand-stimulated collection of semen, apart from a small handful of scientific papers that are basially rubbish. All I can say is that the procedure is fraught with risk but will be worth it. I've been told that male big cats are quick to learn the pleasures of this unusual procedure, and after a fashion will eagerly present rear-on to the collector, often with his penis already partly erect, and it's then a simple matter of massaging the sheath (never the penis, as it's exquisitely sensitive) until full erection results, followed by ejaculation. If one continues to run the sheath up and down the exposed penis, sometimes a second or even third ejaculation results - something impossible withelectroejaculation.

        But female big cats are different. Because of their peculiar physiology, meaning they need intense genital stimulus during mating to ovulate, they are always extremely dangerous at the point of orgasm. The male gets around this with his calming neckbite, reminding her of her cubhood when her mother carried her, and with his quick getaway. I imagine therefore a process of holding a female cat down with straps or something, with a clamp across her neck to simulate the male's bite, while she is inseminated. Even then, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near her when she orgasms!
     

    Q. Does inbreeding occurs among big cats ?

        A. Inbreeding (mating with close relatives) is bad news as far as Nature goes, because it weakens the gene pool. The whole purpose of sex is to mix different genes around so they meet other genes with different material, like people at a rather good party. This semi-random mixing around defeats things such as viruses, which must "lock" onto specific cell membranes to do their nasty work - if genetic mixing, produced by sex, alters cell membranes at random, the naughty viruses can't get in. It's like getting home to find someone's changed the lock on the door.

        That's why we have sex - to mix different genes around to defeat viruses.
        But if an animal (or plant for that matter) mates with a relative, which has almost identical genes, the mixing doesn't introduce any fresh new genes. So nature takes extraordinary measures to stop animals breeding with their relatives. Some insects reach sexual maturity at different ages depending on whether they're male or female, so brothers can't mate sisters. Flowering plants (angiosperms) do a similar thing. Humans, of course, have strict laws against incest. And cats have their own ways of avoiding incest.
       In most cat species, it's a simple process: because they're solitary creatures, tigers, leopards, etc merely need a simple instinct that makes siblings get the wandering urge before reaching sexual maturity. Brothers and sisters who played together as cubs now feel the need to separate, go their different ways. When they become mature, the chances of brother and sister meeting each other again is remote in the huge habitats where they live. Occaisionaly it does happen - brother and sister, or parent and offspring - but so rarely that the gene pool can cope easily.

        With lions, the social cats, it's a little more complicated. Females live together in a pride, and they are nearly all closely related: mothers, daughter, sisters, half-sister, aunts, etc. Males are also related - brothers, half-brothers,etc - but they are not related to the females. This is because the toms that now live in the pride originally didn't - they came from their natal pride, very likely booted the resident toms out, and in a nutshell took over the pride. A leonine military coup.

        When a male cub grows up, he gets the wandering urge. The start of his mane growth also arouses the adult males to give him a good hint or two - make like a tree and leave -  and because lion prides practice synchronised births, his brothers and half-brothers are old enough to also go with him. The wandering toms spend their wilderness years living rough, watching out for rival males defending their own prides, generally laying low and waiting for their chance. When it comes, they stage their take over, kick the resident male out, and take over the new lionesses. So the cubs they father are not born of  incestual sex.

        Or - that's the way it usually works. Nothing's prefekt and mistakes happen - usually when pride structures break down and mass wandering occurs. But again the accidental inbreeding is so minimal that the gene pool can cope.
        An exception seems to be the cheetah. When DNA decoding became possible, geneticists were astonished to find that cheetahs all over Africa have nearly identical gene sequences. Partly as an experiment, and partly as a joke, scientists took a piece of cheetah skin from a zoo in America, carted it to the Serengeti, and transplanted it into a wild cheetah. The graft "took" and wasn't rejected - becasue even the species antibodies are identical! Somewhere in the history of the cheetah, perhaps 10,000 years ago, there was a mysterious disaster the nature of which may never be known. Perhaps only 20 cheetahs were left in the entire world - and somehow they restarted their species from this teetering edge of extinction. I must add, it all happened well before man was making inroads on animal species.

        Personally I've never seen incest in lions or tigers because the zoos I was studying in took measures to prevent it. But in one zoo I saw a male panther (black leopard) mating with his grown daughter; and there are numerous records of zoo, circus, and wild lions and tigers mating with siblings or between generations. One lion in Africa regularly mated with his full sister and they produced several cubs together. There is also a story doing the rounds of a wild lioness, cast out of her natal pride as a nomad, who met a male leopard and eventually mated with him when she came into season, producing a litter of  beautiful little leopons.
        (Feline hybrids are common in captivity - generally lions with tigers - but with a few exceptions the young are always permanently sterile. Tiger on a lioness creates tigons; lion on a tigress produces ligers.)

        I'm not aware of any serious study being done on incest in wild felines, apart from that associated directly with the study of feline sociology. But I would very much like to investigate the curious phenomenon of the in-bred cheetahs - for it goes to show that sometimes a species wobbling on the cliff with only 20-odd viable animals can sometimes, somehow, drag itself back without any assistance from mankind - in either direction!
     

    Q. Is it true that male lions and female tigers sometimes mate and the product of this union is called a Liger?

        A. Yes, it's true that lions and tigers mate and produce young. But because the parents are different species (Panthera leo and Panthera tigris) the young they create, though perfectly healthy, are nearly always sterile - they cannot, in turn, breed. This is to do with the way the chromosomes are sorted out in the division of the sex cells (meiosis), and is a deliberate mechanism that evolved to prevent dilution of the gene pool. The classic example is that of the mule - a donkey stallion with a horse mare - which has characteristics of both species but itself cannot produce young.

         (Matings of more distant relatives - eg a lion (Panthera leo) with a domestic cat (Felis catus), should that be physically possible, produce no young at all. Only a mating between male and female of the same species creates viable, fertile offspring.)
          I've never yet heard of a liger being produced naturally, in the wild, and the reason is pretty obvious when you realise that the only place where wild lions and tigers live together is the Gir Sanctuary in India. (BTW, using my incredibly advanced knowledge of big cat distributions I have accurately identifed the location of the Magical Land of Oz as being in Western India, because Dorothy et al talk of "lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" West India is the only place in the world I know of where these three mentioned species co-exist.)

          But several zoos have produced lion/tiger hybrids with astonishing ease - in fact, Noel Marshall, director of the film Roar and one-time owner of more than fifty assorted big cats, simply put a tiger and a lioness on heat together in the same enclosure and two months later the lioness gave birth to a litter of beautiful tigon cubs.

          Ligers and tigons? The first half of the portmanteau denotes the father - so a lion on a tigress produces ligers, and a tiger mated to a lioness, which is rarer, creates tigons. In my opinion, the reason why tigons are rarer is that male tigers tend to find the courtship behaviour of a lioness too subtle and often miss the vital behavioural cues that signal her willingness to mate.
          Aside from that there is very little to stop a tiger and a lion who are good friends from culminating their friendship in the most obvious way. The entire mating sequence from start to finish is virtually identical for both species, and of course the genitals of both species are perfectly compatible with each other. To both partners, they probably don't care which species is mating with him or her - just as long as they get the promised enjoyment of sex!

          Gestation is normal - about 100 days - and birth is also normal, the mother generally seeking a den or lair and bearing 2-4 cubs, which she will care for with all the motherly devotion of her species - whichever that may be. The cubs show a mixture of the spots of baby lions with tiger stripes.
           Reaching adulthood, the hybrid mix of species becomes very apparent. Males grow skimpy leonine manes and the facial ruff of tigers. Both genders sport spots on the belly and stripes across the back. They roar like lions and purr (or prusten) like tigers; females show the innate togetherness of lionesses, which sometimes conflicts with the tigerish need for solitude. But an especially remarkable feature is the male liger.

          Many male ligers seem to tap a dormant and ancient genetic heritage - of size. A long-neglected gene from the lion father, probably harking back to the days when cave lions were twice the size of your present-day animal, is somehow "switched on" by something in the genes from the tigress mother. The result is a simply huge animal the size of a pony, weighing over half a tonne and yet with an incredibly gentle disposition. I've never seen one in the flesh - but if I did, I would find it hard to resist riding him like a horse!

         There are other big cats hybrids: Koshien Zoo in Japan bred a leopard to a lioness, who subsequently gave birth to a litter of leopons. (The two worked out for themselves how to do it: apparently the lioness lay down on her side and let the much smaller leopard mount her hips, ingenuity of behaviour winning the day in a tricky problem.) The Hagenbeck Hamburg Tierpark got a puma with a leopardess, producing "pumapards"; and yet another facility  in the US mated firstly a jaguar with a leopardess, who gave birth to a single female "jagulep", and when the jagluep grew up she was mated by a male lion and - to everyone's astonishment, and defying what I stated above - conceived and carried to term a litter of "lijaguleps"!

          This was all around the 1900s. Now it is prohibited for zoos and breeders to create hybrid cats - it's considered too wasteful - so they are probably very few ligers or tigers left in the world. Unless, of course, a tiger and lion have managed to strike up a deep freidnship somewhere in the Gir Sanctuary . . .
     

    Q. Can a panther and a cheetah mate and produce an offspring?

        A. Yes, they can. By "panther" (and here I trust you'll excuse the temporary descent into pedantry!) I'm assuming you mean a leopard - specifically, a black leopard (which is what a black panther really is). In the wild state, cheetahs and leopards avoid each other like - well, cats and dogs. The cheetah in particular is forever wary of the larger, stronger leopard, because he knows that a fight between the two would be like pitting a welter-weight boxer against Evander Holyfield. Thus the two steer clear despite that their territories actually overlap, and any chance of one mating with the other is virtually nil.

          But in the captive state it would be possible for enterprising staff to introduce a cheetah and a black leopard ("panther") and, with luck, they'll like each other enough to court, mate, and produce offspring. In a previous Q&A, which is yet to be presented on the Furry Lair site, I replied to a similar question about lions and tigers mating together: the mother conceives and bears live cubs, which are called ligers if the father is a lion (mating with a tigress) and tigons if the father is a tiger (mating with a lioness). Ligers and tigons have characteristics of both parents, because of the same thing that makes us half of each parent, too - chromosomal crossing-over. They have faint tiger stripes and the adult males have lion's manes, they roar like lions and prustren (chuff) like tigers, and their behaviour is a mix of the lion's social nature and the tiger's more solitary one. The cross of a panther and cheetah would, I guess, produce a mix of leopard and cheetah in a similar way. I've never seen one or heard of one being produced, but I imagine he would have the panther's dark coat, but with a cheetah's spots, and a semi-muscular build halfway between the stocky leopard and the rangy cheetah. Perhaps, too, he would have a little of the leopard's phenomenal body stength coupled with the cheetah's running speed - although both would be reduced in proportion, of course.
     

    Q. At what age does the male puma becomes adult? I mean, what is the age of puberty?

        A. Pumas (Felis concolor) are actually the biggest of the small cats, the Felis genus rather than the Panthera  genus of the lion, tiger, etc.This is reflected in the structure of the muzzle, especially the nose-pad which is quite like that of a house cat (only larger!) . . . and in their ageing. Kittens nurse for three months or thereabouts, but are eating meat as early as 5-6 weeks. Lion cubs, by comparison, won't generally look at meat until they're about two months old and can continue nursing until well past their first year. A puma can be regarded as sexually mature at one year (males) to eighteen months (females), and emotionally mature at about two years, the age at which they part company with their mother and strike out on their own into the wild world beyond. (John Seidensticker, "Great Cats: evolution and biology".) If your definition of "puberty" is the age at which a male can father kittens, or a female's first estrus ("heat"), I would say it is that area around 12-18 months. I can't find any reliable figures on physical maturity, but an obvious extrapolation done on my good ol' Casio PB410 puts it around 2 1/2 years for the fully adult muscle bulk to develop. Life expectancy is long - I have figures here for up to 20 years in some cases.

         Again for comparison, male lions (members of the Panthera genus) become aware of their sexuality a little before two years (Mary Chipperfield, "Lions on the Lawn") and lionesses experience first estrus at about two years of age (June Kay, "The Thirteenth Moon"), though this can vary widely from one individual to another, rather like the menarch (first period) in girls. It's worth remembering, of course, that neither gender will be emotionally ready for mating until much older.

    Males start to grow their manes a little after two years, and both genders are fully adult at about three. Life expectancy for a lioness in a good pride is about 15-18 years; that for a male is only about 10 years, reflecting the hard fact that though she is the hunter, he is the guardian and protector.
     

    Q. Does homosexuality among lions and other big cats has been observed?

        A. Homosexuality (I refuse to use the term "gay" in this context!) is not a normal behaviour pattern in felines. In social animals like cattle, deer, etc one female will often mount another to make the male think there's a rival male in his territory, and so draw his attention to her. Male primates use homosexual contacts to reinforce social hierarchy, and this is possibly the origin, if not the current driver, of human male homosexuality.

        But in felines,  male homosexuality is seen only in animals denied access to females (as is the practice in many zoos, a procedure I'm actively campaigning against), or in mentally deranged animals. Female homosexuality is sometimes seen in wild lionesses, and my own belief is that this reflects the fact that lionesses (but not tom lions) are naturally social. I have videotaped one zoo lioness mounting another and thrusting her pelvis; the recipient was happy with this as she was in fact on heat and even raisd her rump, puzzled as to why she wasn't penetrated, but I believe the mounter was acting not on sexuality but proving her social dominance over the recipient.
     

    Q. What's difference between extension and erection ?

        A. Now, if a big cat tom has a female on heat somewhere nearby his scentmarking frequency increases remarkably, as he's making extra sure to protect her from rival toms. Also, because of her alluring condition, he's mildly sexually aroused. So often you'll see a tom enthusiastically spraying everything in sight - with a penis that is unsheathed if not actually erect. Although I have seen a tiger spraying (me and my camera, as a matter of fact!!) with a full erection. The difference, physiologically, between extension and erection is that extension is when the penis is protruded from the sheath, driven by the crurae muscles (and the sigmoid ligament in cervines and bovines), and is under conscious control from the brain. Indeed, the same tiger that sprayed me used to masturbate while lying down by deliberately flexing his penis in and out of its sheath until he reached climax. Cevines (deer) do something similar. Erection (in felines and humans) is when the penis engorges with blood due to muscular vasoconstriction of the genital and pudendal veins, and it is under control of spinal reflex arcs and the autonomic nervous system. It can occur with extension, or without. Thus you can see a male feline with his penis in "normal" mode (tucked flaccid inside the sheath), extended without erection (where it protrudes floppily as in your photograph), erect without extension (which you can tell only by the fact the sheath is longer, stiffer, and visibly harder than normal, with the swollen penis hidden inside), and extension with erection, the "mating" mode, where the penis extends in all its long, firm, tapered glory from the sheath ready to penetrate a female.

        This is all shown neatly in the videos I took of the male tiger when he masturbated. Sometimes he would do it right next to the glass of his enclosure, so I was literally centimetres away from the action and could note everything going on. He'd be lying on one side, apparently asleep, but one could see the telltale slow throbbing of his sheath as his heart rate went up. (Adult lions and tigers have a resting pulse rate of 40-45 bpm.) After a few minutes he'd yawn and stretch and the tip of his penis would momentarily emerge. He would spread his hind legs open slightly, and then begin flexing his sheath up in a slow rhythm until his penis poked out with every flex – extending, but not fully erect. As he continued, getting more and more vigorous, it would lengthen and stiffen up, more and more of it emerging every time he flexed upward until it was fully erect, about ten cm long, firm, tapered, and embossed with the small studs that arouse a tigress when he mates with her.

        Ejaculation would begin with a series of droplets emerging one after another from the tip of his penis, then suddenly the flexing would quicken and strengthen dramatically, he’d writhe around a bit, and ejaculate fully, usually only once but maybe a second time in a narrow spurt that went quite some distance. In the meantime his testicles would be firm and partly drawn up inside his scrotum. Ejaculation would continue as another series of drops, then, a minute or so later, he’d lose his erection, his glans would slide back into its sheath, and he’d relax and go back to sleep. It’s worth noting that he did it only when the tigress in the next cage was on heat and he couldn’t get to her, and that the whole sequence was highly stereotyped. Every time he did it, the process was the same. It’s also notable that ejaculation was always quick and vigorous – representative of the male feline’s need to get in, inseminate, and get out again before his female clobbers him in her violent orgasm.
     

    Q. What's the size of a lion's penis?

        A. I've never been brave enough to measure the penis of a fully erect tom lion, but I've been close enough to that tiger I told you about (only a few cm away through a toughened glass window) to estimate his organ to be about as long as a man's and perhaps as thick at the base, but tapering steadily to a small rounded tip which contains the urethral meatus (orifice). These dimensions are taken at full erection, and given that a fully-grown tom tiger is more than twice the size of a man it is obvious that his penis is a lot smaller in relation to body size - but it's enough to arouse a female tiger - and inseminate her!

        The "collar" is the partly everted inner sleeve of the sheath. At erection, it emerges at the base of the glans as a fleshy pink cylinder wrapped around the base.

        In any case, cats have small penises for their body size, but those of lions and tigers, the super-sized cats more than twice the size of a man, are at my personal guess about the length of a man's penis (from base to tip) when fully erect and extended, and probably about as thick at the base where it emerges from the sheath. It certainly is an impressive sight from close up when he's got it out.
     

    Q. Do lions have spines on their penises?

        A. Well, what I've observed indicates that tom lions don't have spines as prominent as, say, male tigers. As I said before, it makes sense when you consider their social nature and the use of sex as a social bonding thing - they mate so often, and a lioness has free reign amongst all the males of her pride (they take turns at her!), that I think a lioness in season would start feeling really sore with too many spined penises entering her vagina. Having observed closeup a tiger's erect penis and a lion's erect penis, I am struck by the fact the lion's shaft seems merely dimpled a little in the places where the tiger has studs. The studs of a tiger (and a cheetah, I've been told) are like those of the outer flesh of a strawberry - prominent and visible, but not actually sticking out very far.

         Those of a domestic tomcat, however, are the full bit - long and protruding from the shaft of the penis. By the way, I've recently learned that a female cat's vagina has rings of cartilage inside it, I assume to help hold the male's penis inside her while he ejaculates, and is tapered to match the taper of his glans. Her clitoris is hooded like that of most female mammals, but extends just prior to intercourse for maximum stimulus, rather like the male's penis extends.

        I think in a lion's penis the dimples are where the spines would be in other cat species.
     

    Q. Is that right that big cats (and most mammals) have a bone in their penises?

        A. The zoologists call it the os penis ; others call it the baculum, or just the penis bone. Not many humans realise it exists in male animals - because we are one of the few who don't have one. (In fact, we seem so different from other mammals that I sometimes wonder if we really aren't descended from space aliens - we have a poor sense of smell and little use of pheremones, we are almost hairless, our females have menstrual cycles instead of oestrus (heat) cycles, men have a free-hanging penis that does not protrude from its sheath during erection, and they don't have a baculum.)

        So other male mammals have a penis bone - in some animals like the walrus it's the same size and shape as a decent sized club and the Innuit people use it for just that. Imagine getting bashed over the head by the bone of a walrus's cock! In dogs it can be easily felt - I was trained by a vet to feel it to assess if it is broken or not - and even cats have it, although in the domestic moggy it's tiny, smaller than a grain of rice. The baculum is not attached to the rest of the skeleton - it's entirely shrouded by the mass of penile tissue around it, and receives its own blood supply through the penile arteries. It has no nerves.

        But what does it do? Why has nature endowed male animals with a bone in their penises which, if broken by a hasty act of sex, can cause excruciating pain and loss of libido? If you watch animals like cattle and deer mating, you'll be astonished at how quick the act is - blink and you miss it. Sex might be fun, but for prey animals it's the most vulnerable part of their existence - a female antelope or whatever, imprisoned under a rutting male with his penis in her vagina, can't exactly blow a fast getaway if a lion comes on the scene. So they mate with haste, and the male has little time to waste getting an erection in order to slip one into a willing female. Because male erection is a matter of hydraulic engineering, it takes too much time to build up enough pressure to make his penis turgid. The baculum solves all that. It's as if his penis is permanently erect, even when stored inside his body, and all he has to do is climb onto a female, flex his ever-ready hard-on out of its sheath,  poke his mate, and jump off again.

        The baculum probably evolved in ungulates for this reason - but I think that animals later disovered another nice reason for having a stiffy inside the stiffy. It turns females on like crazy. The baculum is not smooth - it has bumps and curves, and must feel like one of those custom Japanese dildos when it goes in. In animals like cats and camels, where genital stimulus is vital for the female to become fertile, this is an obvious advantage.

        The baculum of a lion or tiger is 2-3mm long, with a small knopf or knob on each end. I have no idea if it assists in arousing a lioness or tigress, or if it's just an evolutionary hangover like the appendix of humans - it's uncertain if such a small object could be felt by a mating female cat. But there is the fascinating addition to this phenomenon of male cats having a penis bone: females have one too, in their clitorises!
        The clitoris is a homologue to the male penis. In mammal embryos, the same mass of genital tissue that will become the penis of a male will become the clitoris of a female, often with the same character of the penis in miniature. A mare's clit is longish and capped by a tulip-shaped head, much like a stallion's penis; so, of course, is a woman's; and the clit of a female feline has the same tiny bumps and studs where a male's penis would have its spines. So it's not surprising in the end to learn that the females of those species whose males have bacula have them too.

        In lionesses and tigress, and other big cats too, I guess, the tiny bone in the clitoris acts to amplify the movements of that of the male during intercourse - and thus she gets not only a satisfying orgasm, but the necessary stimulus to conceive as well.
        So next time you hear of so-and-so's dog boning the next-door neighbour's bitch, you'll know he means it literally.
     

    Q. Is that true that tom lions lick lioness' labia? Or a lioness licks her labia, or a lion licks his penis?

        A. Yes, it's true. A tom lion isn't interested in giving cunnilingus, all he wants is the female's smell - but he happens to stimulate her vulva while doing it, which is what she wants. Lions are like almost all mammals in that they are turned on by scent. In fact, only the higher primates - which unfortunately includes us humans - DON'T attach any importance to smell. Lions use scent to track prey, find water, and regulate their social behaviour. So it's only natural that sex is included. I'd once been playing with a bitch who was in heat, and some time later I visited a friend's place, whose male dog sniffed my clothes, then jumped on me and tried to mate with my leg! (Good burglar's trick, in fact - distracts guard dogs like you wouldn't belive!)

        So yes, tom lions are keenly attracted to the smell of a lioness in heat, it's sort of their equivalent to a beautiful woman seductively taking off her clothes. One source of this scent (it's called a pheremone, by the way) is in the cheek glands, which is why cats rub cheeks. But the main source of the sex pheremone is the anal glands, two small glands each side of a lioness's vulva. (If you get to see under a lioness's tail, you may notice them as a dark dot on either side of her vulva.) Naturally, the tom's sense of smell leads him in here, as per my story, and he nuzzles and licks to get more of her alluring perfume.
    It just so happens that he also nuzzles and licks her vulva, which is between the glands, and that of course turns her  on in a big way. I've seen a lioness lying on her back with her male going for it between her legs - he is driven crazy by her wonderful smell, and she is driven to near-orgasm by his tongue on her genitals, writhing slowly with her legs flexing upward each time he licks her.

        More rarely is the case of lionesses licking a tom's penis, although again I have seen it done. Just as there is a one-way bias towards men getting turned on by naked women, and not the other way round, so a tom lion is turned on by a lioness's scent and not the other way round. Also, whereas lionesses are used to body contact, toms tend to resent it a little - something I've learned myself in handling lions - and the few times I've watched a lioness take a lick between a tom's legs he took it only for a few moments before moving away with a warning growl - although once he stood there and flexed his sheath upward several times after she'd licked him.

        On the other hand, toms will definitely lick their own penises, and lionesses their vulvas. Male self-masturbation is a common thing in zoo animals, and it's also been seen in wild tigers frustrated by a tigress in heat that's been claimed by a more dominant male. They love the feel of their tongues on their genitals - I have seen a male lion really getting stuck in between his hind legs, licking his sheath, his fully erect penis, and his testicles until finally with a series of ectstatic grunts and hip thrusts he ejaculates. I haven't seen a lioness bring herself to orgasm by licking her vagina, although again a lioness in heat seems to really like doing it. Her tongue is far too big and inflexible to insert between her labia, so neither she nor a male can actually get to her clitoris and trigger an orgasm, but I guess the rough, powerful tongue is capable of massaging the outer and inner lips against the hood anyway, so she'll get a pretty strong turn-on just the same.

        Some lionesses will also lick and nibble their own nipples, sometimes to erection.
     

    Q. Do female lick the male's tiger penis?

        A. Male cats don’t like their genitals being touched except by themselves but this is only a rule of thumb! Just as you would not want such intimate contact on a very sensitive part except by a trusted friend, so with a lion or tiger, and only a few times have I seen a lioness lick a male’s penis. Lionesses and tigresses on heat are attracted to the male’s genital scent as much as he is to hers and I think she also knows what it is that enters her body so pleasurably when she allows him to mount her, and perhaps wants to urge him to "use it". A lioness I watched several times put her muzzle under her mate’s tail while he stood and nuzzled, then licked his sheath, distinctly running her tounge over the aperture where the penis emerges from. He stood there allowing her this intimate contact for about three seconds, then growled slightly and moved off. There was no visible evidence of erection. I have never seen this in tigers. I have read, however, of a zoo in America where a male lion allowed his twin sister this liberty while he lay on his back with his legs spread; apparently he got a partial erection at her repeated licking, then she would flehmen (grimace) at his male scent and wander away. A fictional book I once read, set in South Africa, mentioned lionesses on heat "nudging [the male’s] pendulous scrotum to goad him into action" whether this is based on the author’s personal observation, or made up from imagination, can’t be said.

    On the other hand (paw?) male lions and tigers love to lick their mates’ vulvas when the females are in full estrus, and the females get a really hot enjoyment from it, writhing on their backs with the hind legs splayed and the tail arching upward with each tounge-stroke. I’ve seen it in both species.
     

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