While never truly domesticated due to the difficulty in breeding them in captivity, Cheetahs have been raised from the time they were cubs by nobility and used as hunting companions since the year 1700 BCE, starting in Ancient Egypt.
The world’s smallest feline species is the Rusty-Spotted Cat from India and Sri Lanka, weighing in at a mere 3 pounds adult size! For scope, the average house cat weighs around 10 lbs.
The Borneo Bay Cat is likely the least understood wildcat in the world, with under 25 confirmed specimens ever recorded since it was discovered in 1874, with the first live one only being caught in 1992. These few encounters are spread between pelts, veritable sightings and photographs. Even after extensive efforts to document them in the wild relatively little is known about their behavior and ecology. It is estimated that there are likely fewer than 2,500 left in the wild, with their biggest threat being the deforestation of Borneo by Palm Oil Plantations to gain farmland.
The Iberian Lynx was once brought to fewer than 100 individuals left on earth in 2002 due to a combination of habitat loss, vehicle collisions and the extermination efforts targeting the European Rabbit, its primary food source. Thankfully, due to breeding programs and conservation efforts focusing on protecting swaths of wilderness and reestablishing rabbit populations, there are now over 1,600, with that number growing year over year since!
Clouded Leopards are noteworthy for many distinct features, including their ability to rotate their ankles to climb down trees head first like a squirrel, and their long tails which make up almost half their body length and are used to assist with balance when hunting in the canopy of southeast Asian rainforest. What’s especially noteworthy is that they are the most basal member of the feline family, meaning they’re the farthest removed from everything else, or as some might informally put it, “the most prehistoric”. Part of what aids in that “prehistoric” look is the fact that they have the largest fangs for their size of any wildcat, giving them the appearance of sabreteeth when they open their mouth.
Giraffes have long, muscular tongues that often appear a dark purple. The reason for this is to allow them to strip foliage from thorny trees, with the color preventing sunburn while they do so. The trees have evolved a countermeasure however, with some species having specialized hollows in their branches to encourage biting ants to nest in them, and upon seeing their home under attack, the ants will pour out of their nest and bite the tongue of the giraffe, something it has yet to evolve a counter for.
Elephants fearing mice is a common feature in old cartoons, with reports claiming that they were scared the little vermin would crawl up their trunks. While this has been largely debunked, it has been proven that elephants are incredibly fearful of bees, to the extent that some clever farmers in areas where elephants regularly raid fields and damage crops, have started fostering beehives along their fence line to create an affordable, elephant proof barrier. Many conservation organizations have taken up educating on and spreading this practice, as it is a practical method for reducing a major human-wildlife conflict that has historically resulted in problem elephants destroying property and at times even killing villagers, ultimately being shot when professional hunters are called in as the situation becomes untenable.
Hippopotamus have long been considered herbivores, as they spend the day lazing in the water and come out at night to feed on mainly grass and occasionally other foliage and fruits. It is now being considered that they are not obligate herbivores, but instead facultative herbivores, meaning that while they primarily consume plant matter, they are not stranger to consuming other animals for protein, which partially explains their hyper aggressive behavior towards any and all other animals that attempt to enter their stretch of river or watering hole, as it goes from simply territorial aggression to partial predation. Consuming meat is still rare for them however, and is likely only performed to meet nutritional requirements, as unsurprisingly an all grass diet may be filling, but lacks some essential minerals. Similar behavior is seen in a variety of other herbivores, with deer being a more common predator of baby birds than expected species such as snakes or hawks in some studied areas.
Zebras, despite their equine appearance, are more closely related to donkeys than horses, as seen most obviously in their tail only having hair on the end, like that of a wild ass. Zebras also bark and bray like donkeys when aggravated or startled. What makes them unique, their stark black and white stripes, are theorized to have two primary benefits. One is that it breaks up their outline, with predators hopefully having trouble determining where one animal ends and another begins when they flee as a group. The other is that something about the pattern throws off the perception of biting insects, with studies showing that zebras and horses painted with black and white stripes are bitten less frequently than those without.
Cape Buffalo are among the most dangerous animals in Africa, known colloquially as Widowmaker or Black Death to some native tribes due to the risk in hunting them. In some areas, injury by Cape Buffalo is the leading cause of lion mortality, as they will gore and trample lions that attempt to prey upon them. The difficulty inherent in bringing down such powerful and aggressive beasts is so great that wildlife biologists have divided lions into two hunting cultures: those that hunt buffalo, and those that don’t. The buffalo hunters don’t only bring down buffalo, but what sets them apart is their greater cohesion and use of strategy when attempting to target that sort of big game. The non-buffalo hunters meanwhile may try to bring down a buffalo if desperate or foolhardy, but are much more likely to fail the hunt or be injured in the process, primarily targeting smaller game like antelope and zebra. Furthermore, cape buffalo are so dangerous, that the ancient Greeks who’d traveled to and heard stories from the African continent told legends of the “Ethiopian Bull”, a hyper aggressive, carnivorous beast with horns that could curve to best impale you and with a hide tough as flint. They said the only reliable way to kill it was to trap it in a narrow pit where it would be unable to move, with its incredible fury and rage at its confinement causing it to die of stress.
There are two types of rhino in Africa, those being the white and the black, with numerous subspecies of each. Ironically, both are gray. The presumed reason for their names either comes down to them wallowing in mud and clay to cause darker colors and the guano of oxpeckers and egrets upon their backs making them look white, or more probably it being a derivation from the original Dutch name for the beasts. See, the Dutch were some of the first Europeans to settle South Africa, with these agrarian settlers being referred to as “Boers”, which translated to farmer. They noticed the difference between the two was that what would become known as the white rhino had a flat, wide lip suited for cropping the grass, while what we now call the black rhino had a narrow, almost prehensile lip built for stripping foliage from branches. This lead them to refer to the former of the two as the “Wijd” or Wide Rhino. The later English settlers who came to the area and weren’t versed in Dutch assumed they were saying White, and if one species was the white rhino, then it was only fitting to call the other the black rhino.