Lion/Domestic Cat mix anybody?

[Godzillasuarus Rex]

Hey every one Ijust want to ask you a question.Do you think big cat/house cat hybrids should be created and made into a breed. Now the topic is not "if we could" but "if we should". tell me, what do you think. I think it would be an excellent idea; it would spare exotic cat owners the trouble of controversy, as well as every one having their own "big cat"!

[Ash]

If it were possible, then sure. That'd be awesome. But, sadly, it's not possible (though I know you didn't want to to discuss the feasibility of it). Kind of like how I think it'd be cool to have miniature elephants and giraffes--awesome, but not feasible.

Maybe one day far in the future we can find the genes that control size, work with them, and maybe get there (though it is far more difficult than just that, obviously; lots of other things go into it). Also think that maybe one day we'll be able to "re-create" dinosaurs, but not necessarily from fossils.

There will always be people who find these types of things controversial, but to me, animal experimentation is 100% okay in my book. It's amazing what we can do these days.

Now me, personally, I draw the line at humans, which I believe should not be messed with. I know we're scientifically... "animals," but, honestly I feel like that devalues human life. Humans and animals are completely different in my book and always will be.

Went off an a tangent there... But if it were actually possible to do big cat X little cat hybrids, that would be really neat and I'd have 20 of em, lol.

[TamanduaGirl]

Mini elephants aren't impossible but probably not in our lifetime. There were mini mammoths in the past. Pygmy Mammoth - elephas falconeri If they ever do clone the mammoth then there will be a chance of getting minis too. http://www.wolterdesign.de/content/imag ... j-533x.jpg

[Ash]

That's cool about the mini elephants/mammoths. Maybe my mom's dream of having a mini elephant will come true. That's very interesting though, and I'm really anxious to see if we can get anywhere with the mammoth cloning project. There haven't been updates on it for quite some time though, so makes me think they're not really getting far with the project. Wish we'd at least get some updates.

I do think one day (probably not in my lifetime) we'll be able to recreate raptor-like dinosaurs from bird embryos with genetic engineering and selective breeding--though not sure how you'd get the sharp teeth. I remember hearing (don't have a source) about some chickens embryos that were experimented on that retained their longer prenatal tails.

I don't think it would be far-fetched to assume we could one day produce a "little dinosaur" with feathers. The most current theory on raptor-like dinosaurs anyway is that they had feathers when young, and they're definitely more birdlike than anything else we currently have on the earth (well, the raptor dinosaurs, that is, like velociraptor, t-rex, etc). The old theory was that they were more reptilian, but that's not really possible and has been discarded.

If I could have a velociraptor, miniature or regular-sized... that would be a dream come true. They're my favorite. :) I bet with dinosaurs we'd be surprised at how "different" they'd be from how we currently portray them in movies and cartoons. Probably a lot more birdlike in action and movement, but I don't know for sure. Lots of eye-pinning and tilting heads.

So if we could make mini lions and tigers around the size of a serval, I definitely think that would be cool. But at this point in time it sadly isn't feasible. Of course, as soon as someone started trying to do it, you'd have tons of people opposed to it too.

[BlueBaby1023]

But if it were actually possible to do big cat X little cat hybrids, that would be really neat and I'd have 20 of em, lol.

Count me in on that. A private pride of, essentially, mini lions.

[Nìmwey]

There have apparently been hybrids between leopards and cougars, and leopards are in the large cat, or Pantherinae subfamily (as are lions), while cougars are in the small cat or Felinae subfamily (as are domestic cats).
Cats and lions share a common ancestor as far back as cougars and leopards, when the ancestor to both large and small cats split.

So in theory, it sounds like it should work. O_o But at the same time maybe not.
It would be if some mad scientist attempted to fertilize a lion egg with cat sperm or something, and see if it would even conceive.

I can't believe hybrids like that would be healthy, though. Nature isn't meant to be tampered with that way.

[naja-naja]

Certain hybrids between different species of cats, even different genera, are possible. Lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars for example, can all be bred into each other. Leopards and pumas can be bred into each other also (the resulting offspring, called a pumapard, actually growing to be about half the size of either parent species) possibly a lion to puma hybrid could be done, or of that were not possible then a liopard or leopon could be bred into a puma (lion to leopard, the resulting hybrid offspring bred back into a puma) and if the offspring of these crosses had the same small build as the pumapards, then they could be a pretty good mini lion. Mini tigers used to exist in nature, the Bali tiger, now extinct, was the world's smallest tiger subspecies, about comparable to a leopard or puma. The biggest males got up the 100kg (220lbs)... The Sumatran tiger, by contrast, today's only surviving Indonesian tiger, gets up to 40% larger then this and the Siberian tiger, the world's largest, got to over 3 times this size. A small Bali female could be as small as 65kg fully grown.