huffingtonpost - 7 hours ago

Domestic cat vs lion s roarYears ago, I was sitting in a friend’s living room with their cats when a lion documentary came on. A little bit of me wanted to change the channel – I worried the dainty pets felt a bit of “look what your cousin is doing!” shame while the majestic pride roared and pounced on-screen. Then, I looked at their four-storey-tall scratching post, personalised beds, and recently-filled anti-slip food bowl. You know what, I figured, they probably feel just fine. It has likely been millions of years since domestic cats split from their larger, wilder ancestors. In that time, our feline friends have become smaller, less aggressive, and possibly better at remembering things.But, a member of Reddit’s r/explainlikeimfive made clear, some of us are still unsure why the big cat’s roar quietened to a more demure meow among domestic species.Why do cats meow if tigers roar?According to BBC Wildlife, it’s down to a change in their throat’s anatomy. Where domestic cats have an epihyal bone in their voice box, bigger cats, like lions and tigers, have a stretchier ligament instead. And because the ligament is (obviously) stretchier than bone, cats with the feature can enjoy a larger sound passageway and therefore a greater range of pitch. The tissue, which extends all the way to big cats’ skulls, “gives the larynx enough flexibility to produce a full-throated, terrifying roar,” the Carnegie Museum of Natural Science said. But not all roars are alike, some researchers claim. Gustav Peters and Marcell Peters from the Zoological Research Museum in Bonn suggested that the environment big cats live in can change how they express their loudest noises. They found that big cats in dense environments, like forests, made higher-pitched “meows” – those who lived on open plains were more likely to have a deeper roar.The purring/roaring binary Another reason for cats to feel smug: they can while lions, tigers, and other animals with the ability to roar cannot. This, the National Wildlife Federation explained, is because the “tightly connected linkage of delicate bones” that prevent domestic cats from roaring are crucial to purring. Among cats, the BBC said, the ability to make each noise is “mutually exclusive”.Well, now you know!Related...Cats Have Given Alzheimer s Scientists Hope For Breakthrough ResearchI Just Learned Why Cats Like Concrete Slabs So Much, And It s So... CatI Just Learned Why Humans Originally Kept Cats, And I m Horrified

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