How Your Cat is and is not like a Lion

How Your Cat is and is not like a Lion

August 10 is World Lion Day, dedicated to raising awareness of the conservation issues affecting lions in the wild. Big cats appeal to us in large part because they have similarities to pet cats. In fact, there are significant ways in which lions are more similar to domestic cats than other wild felines, but there are some interesting differences, too. We spoke to John Bradshaw, author of the book Cat Sense, about how your cat is — and is not — like a lion.
Feline Society

There are only two cat species in which the females raise their young together: the lion and the domestic cat, Bradshaw says. Lions live in prides where the females care for their cubs together. Similarly, when cats are living outdoors on their own, three or four females will put their kittens in one nest that they all defend. The mother cats will also go out hunting and bring back food that they allow all of the kittens to eat. Breeders and rescuers can make use of this behavior by putting orphaned kittens or those whose mothers are short of milk with another nursing female. “What they’re taking advantage of is the fact that mother cats basically don’t seem to recognize their own kittens, which is unusual,” Bradshaw says.

However, the social lives of domestic cats and lions differ on the male side. “In lions, the males also cooperate,” Bradshaw says. “It’s virtually unheard of for male domestic cats to cooperate.” Although we think of there being one male lion in charge, Bradshaw says that actually a pride includes a group of males, usually closely related to each other but not to the females. “The reason they are in a group is to defend those females from other groups of males,” he says. That defense is important to the survival of the pride; when a new group of males takes over, Bradshaw says, “the first thing they do is kill all the cubs. [The new males] know they’re not theirs, because they’ve only just arrived, and they want to get the females breeding again as soon as possible so they can produce offspring of their own.”
For big cats, that social cooperation extends to hunting as well: Though domestic cats hunt alone, lions usually hunt together. “It’s mostly the females that do it,” Bradshaw says, “and the males kind of tag along and take the best bits after the females have done all the work.” According to Bradshaw, those different hunting styles are connected to the different kinds of prey that domestic cats and lions eat. “The reason that lions can afford to be sociable is that they have the ability to hunt very large animals that will feed several lions for a day or two,” he says. Domestic cats likely never evolved cooperative hunting because of their small size — even in groups they couldn’t compete with larger predators, so they stuck with the solo hunting of small prey.

Social Habits

We may think of lions as diurnal — they’re always shown being active during the day on nature shows — while domestic cats certainly seem annoyingly nocturnal when they’re knocking stuff off your dresser at 2 a.m. That is more or less true, but neither feline is completely locked into a schedule. “Most cats are fairly flexible about whether they’re nocturnal or diurnal, because they’re adapting to their prey and the weather and the time of year,” Bradshaw explains.

But you can see their differing tendencies reflected in their anatomy. Large eyes are a clue that an animal hunts at night, and the cat’s eyes are much bigger in proportion to the head than the eyes of lions, which tend to hunt in daylight. “Cats descended from animals who tend to hunt at night,” Bradshaw says. “Lions do hunt and move around at night — people who go on safari will tell you that lions roar at night — but generally speaking [they] do most of their hunting during the day, and the way their vision is constructed tells you that.”

Big Cat, Little Cat

Lions, domestic cats and all other felines are obligatory carnivores, relying on meat much more strictly than other families of carnivores. Pandas are descended from meat-eaters but eat only bamboo, while dogs are actually better at digesting grain than wolves are, a change that happened in the course of their domestication. “But both lions and domestic cats are locked into a meat-eating lifestyle,” Bradshaw says, suggesting that they may have a more limited ability to utilize certain plant material in their diet.

Because their digestive system and metabolism are unusual in that way, you can’t feed your cat a vegetarian diet, and, he says, “There couldn’t be a pacifist lion. A lion couldn’t put its hand up and say, ‘I’m not going to kill anymore, I’m going to eat grass.’ It simply doesn’t have the equipment in its body to do so.” Cats need so much protein that without it they quickly start to waste way. “If we’re short of protein, we just run on carbohydrates,” he says. “If you restrict the protein a cat or lion gets, all it can do is start digesting its own muscles. They cannot stop themselves from breaking down protein.”

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