Thursday, August 03, 2006

Here, kitty, kitty



No, this is not a Photoshopped image. Meet Hercules, a liger. He is the love child of a lion dad and a tiger mom who shared an enclosure at the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species in Miami, Florida.

Hercules stands 10 feet tall on his hind legs and is still growing. At three years, he weighs half a ton and eats up to 100 pounds of meat per day.

In the wild, lions and tigers are natural enemies, but captivity makes strange bedfellows. There are a handful of ligers around the world, bred either accidentally like Hercules, or deliberately.

There are also a few tigons, the result of a tiger father and lion mother. Tigons are smaller than ligers and look more like tigers.

I have never had a liger or a tigon. This grave deficiency must be remedied immediately. Honey, can we get one? Pleeeease? I promise I'll take care of it, you won't have to do a thing.....

5 comments:

heartinsanfrancisco said...

P.S. I wonder how big his litter box is.

urban-urchin said...

I worked on a movie where we had ligers, lions and tigers. Ligers are very very big. VERRRYYYYY BIGGG. Scary big in that you realize you'd be nothing more than a little cocktail weiner on a stick to them. They are also very very stinky.

The woman in production had to stay off set when the big cats were there if we had our period. Nice huh?

heartinsanfrancisco said...

Yikes!! It sounds like swimming in shark-infested waters where even a paper cut attracts attention and you become lunch.

So you're telling me that I should reconsider my birthday request and ask my husband for a stegosaurus instead? I think they were herbivores.

jali said...

I want to watch the movie "Born Free" or at least some "Daktari" reruns now. I love the big cats!

Maybe I can just catch some "Thundercat" reruns and call it a day.

heartinsanfrancisco said...

This beast makes Elsa look tiny.

The urchin's comment about how bad ligers smell snapped me back to a semblance of reason as my olfactory sense is always in overdrive.

Wolves are amazingly clean. Baby always smelled like a Stieff stuffed animal.