WHAT ARE HYBRID BIG CATS?
WHAT ARE HYBRID BIG CATS? Zoos and menageries once bred exotic-looking hybrid big cats to attract the public just as hybrid small cats (Bengal, Chausie etc) are now bred as pets. Hybrids are unlikely in the wild. Where big cat species have overlapping territories, they usually have different lifestyles and rarely meet. If they do meet, conflict is more likely than romance. To deliberately breed hybrids, the parent cats are raised together to overcome any natural enmity between their species. Some hybrids occur accidentally where different cat species were housed together for convenience; the keepers did not realise that the cats would – or even could – mate. The urge to mate can be so strong that they will mate with each other if there is no available partner of their own species. The belief that big cats readily inter-mated and produced all manner of hybrid offspring is found in the writings of Roman author Pliny, in “Historia Naturalise”. Pliny described the lustful and competitive n
