@futurebird Some of these stripes and spotty kitties look a little more friendly than mountain lions! If you've never heard a mountain lion scream after it's caught prey, the sound will chill you to the bone. That is not a kitty cat that I would want to be near at any time. I can't run fast at all!
@futurebird I've often wondered if big cats, and especially leopards, are the source of the fear of a monster in the dark. Leopards tend to hunt at night and are good tree climbers (where primates tend to gather at night) and they certainly have claws and teeth.
> And we went out and found dozens of different animals from reptiles to birds to fish to all sorts of mammals of every size and went look! My hands! I can pat you! Wanna be friends?
@futurebird Have you ever seen one in person? I haven't, but I have seen cougar (aka mountain lion, or catamount) and they're scary in a way that doesn't come through in pictures. I totally get wanting to hug a bear (don't!) but never a cougar.
I was walking back to my village with 2 buddies on the western edge of the Rift Valley escarpment, after quaffing a few beers at the nearest bar. Overlaid on our old tracks was a humongous lion paw print. I immediately looked at the nearest tree: one kilometer away! My pals were Kalinjinn, a tribe with the best runners in Kenya, known for winning Olympic medals. I knew I'd be last in any race to the tree & be lion bait. I wondered if I'd trip a pal to survive - but...no lion.
@futurebird I stuck my hand through a lions cage to ‘pet the kitty’ in an old zoo. I didn’t notice that luckily there was an electrified fence that shocked the hell out me, before the lion might have bit it!
@futurebird@ramsey@AMS
it's a leopard, not a cheetah; the spots are arranged in circles of spots, and it has stocky limbs; compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheetah#/media/File:Cheetah,_Masai_Mara_(52448476886).jpg
but if it was cheetah, I have read cheetah are easy to tame, and that people capturing and taming cheetahs for pet trade is a serious conservation problem. Cheetah are also not nearly as big as other "big cats", so a healthy human that would be in great danger from a leopard (for example ), could probably subdue a difficult cheetah.