Tigers eat leopards, why don't cats eat them?

According to legend, the cat is the owner of the tiger. In order to prevent "teaching the apprentice to starve to death", the cat left a hand-it didn't teach the tiger the ability to climb trees, so the tiger exposed his nature after learning it, and there was nothing he could do about the cat with strong ability to climb trees.

Of course, this is just a folk story. In fact, tigers can climb trees, but compared with smaller cats, their ability to climb trees is not particularly strong.

Tigers can't climb trees?

There is no doubt that all cats can climb trees, because climbing trees is not a difficult action, it only needs to have jumping ability, grasping ability and strong limbs, and tigers have developed limbs and claws suitable for grasping. Most importantly, although the tiger is big, it has a strong jumping ability. In the case of run-up, the tiger can jump to a height of more than 3 meters.

Tigers have a good ability to climb trees, which can be described as a "dead hand" to leopards in India. According to relevant records, only from 1986 to 1988, five leopards were killed by tigers in Wang Chi National Park, of which four were on the ground and 1 was only in a tree. However, there is no description about how to kill them.

Last year, also in Wang Chi National Park, staff witnessed tigers killing leopards. At this time, the leopard turned and ran after seeing the tiger, followed by the tiger. After that, the leopard chose a relatively close tree and began to climb. However, when the leopard climbed to about 3 meters above the ground, it was slapped by the tiger, and finally the leopard died tragically.

In Rajaji National Park, not far from Wang Chi National Park, the situation of leopards is even worse. With the gradual increase in the number of tigers in the park, the number of leopards has decreased by nearly 80%, and the main reason for the decrease is the killing of Bengal tigers.

Of course, the threat of tigers to leopards is mainly on the ground, especially in open areas, and the success rate of tiger hunting will greatly increase. In the jungle, tigers have many records of failure to kill leopards, and the reason is also climbing trees, because although tigers can climb trees, they are much worse than leopards and other animals.

Tigers in Rentenbor Nature Reserve are killing leopards, but they finally give up.

Then, the same big cat, why is the tiger's ability to climb trees not as good as that of the leopard?

In fact, not only the leopard, but also the tiger's tree climbing ability is worse than all cats whose size is equal to or smaller than the leopard, which is actually related to the tiger's niche.

For many cats, climbing trees is either a way of hunting. For example, clouded leopards will come down from trees to kill passing animals or it is a way to protect themselves. Cats are mostly small and medium-sized and are typical solitary animals. There are often big cats and social carnivores in the habitat, so climbing trees is a way of self-protection. In areas where leopards are distributed and overlapped with tigers, they mainly rely on climbing trees quickly and climbing high places to prevent tigers from killing.

Tigers, like lions, have almost no animals that can threaten them in their habitats, and their prey comes from the ground. So they rarely climb trees, and their ability to climb trees will naturally weaken.

Moreover, among cats, tigers are the largest living animals, such as Siberian tigers and Bengal tigers, and their average adult weight even reaches 190 kg. Obviously, the heavier the weight, the worse it is for climbing trees. In fact, cats' ability to climb trees comes from their ancestor, Proailurus, which is similar in size to today's domestic cats.

The first cats had long tails, stout limbs, sharp claws and big eyes, and their body proportions were somewhat similar to those of civet cats. At that time, they were highly arboreal animals, staying in trees almost all day, and only killing small mammals on land at night.

So cats are born with the ability to climb trees, which is inherited by ancestors. However, in the later evolution, different cats have different bodies and niches, so some big cats don't need to climb trees often, which weakens their ability to climb trees.

Even leopards can't escape the tiger. Why did the tiger let the cat go?

There are no cats in the tiger's diet, but this is obviously not the reason why the tiger can't climb trees, nor is it the reason that "the cat is the owner of the tiger", but because of the following two factors:

First: necessity

In nature, one animal must kill another animal for a reason, usually for two reasons: prey and competition. As long as either of these two factors is satisfied, animals will be killed. Let's take the tiger as an example. Tigers kill wild boar because wild boar accounts for a high proportion in the tiger's diet.

Tigers kill leopards because they are competitors in the same habitat. Although leopards are not as big as tigers, quite a few of their prey overlap. So out of competition, tigers kill leopards when they see them, which is exactly the same as why lions kill hyenas.

But cats are so small that their prey can only be small mammals or birds, which do not coincide with the food of tigers, so there is no competition between them, and tigers are naturally too lazy to kill wild cats.

Second: there is almost no chance to meet each other.

Cats can be divided into domestic cats and wild cats, in which domestic cats are domesticated from African wild cats (especially Egyptian wild cats), while tigers have never entered Africa since the beginning of evolution. Today, wild tigers are still roaring in the mountains and have no chance to meet domestic cats, so domestic cats have never met tigers from beginning to end, let alone killed them.

Of course, wildcats are not only African wildcats, but also desert cats, jungle cats and Asian wildcats. Among them, desert cats are only distributed in the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, while jungle cats are mainly distributed in Tibet and Yunnan in China. Although there are tigers in Yunnan (few Indo-Chinese tigers), jungle cats are widely distributed along rivers, reeds or shrubs around lakes, coastal forests, or forests and fields with tall grass.

Finally, there are Asian wildcats. Asian wildcats and African wildcats are subspecies of Asian wildcats and African wildcats. It is only distributed in western China and inhabits grasslands, swamps, basins or forest areas in lowland mountains below 65,438+0,000m above sea level. There is no coincidence with the distribution of tigers today. However, according to the distribution of Asian wildcats, they may belong to the same domain as Xinjiang Tiger, but there is no record of their interaction.

Finally, cats and tigers have the same ancestor, but they evolved separately about13 million-1/kloc-0 million years ago, so there is no evolutionary relationship between them, and the distribution of cats and tigers does not overlap much, which leads to almost no intersection between them. So it's normal for tigers not to kill cats. On the one hand, they