I've seen a black feral cat the size of my red heeler and I've seen a melanistic leopard free roaming, both on a former property in SA I was living on. A huge feral cat still looks nothing more than a huge feral cat no matter how big. A free roaming leopard looks absolutely nothing like a free roaming feral cat in size shape movement and appearance. You know what you see even if those who didn't will tell you they know what you saw. The big black tom walking across the road just looked like a normal everyday oversized feral moggy in every way. Not even close to the appearance of a melanistic leopard. There is one photo in this video that explains exactly why feral cats have spread so rapidly with no competition. A dingo hanging with feral cats. We've removed and continue to removed the original apex predator and the one species that controls and removes invasive predators. Where Dingoes remain native species remain, where Dingoes have been removed from only roos feral herbivores feral cats and foxes remain with local extinction of almost all smaller native animals. Are a few farmers sheep worth a landscape stripped bare by uncontrolled herbivores devoid of native animals just so a farmer can make an extra couple of hundred at most dollars extra profit while the rest of Australia is blown away in dust?
@@Richard-gy1pq Utube's been playing games and deleting my replies so this is a waste of time probably. The prints left by the one we watched were 125mm wide. (12•5cm)
I just have to say that one would be surprised as to how many people mistake feral cats for their larger relatives, even in places in which these larger feline species live.
I wonder how large those cats will get. With no natrual predators and unlimited amounts of food. Evolution will select for bigger and stronger cats. In a couple of hundred years those cats will reach enormous proportions. Absolutely fascinating in my opinion.
Wrong. Predators only gain size when their prey does and they need the bulk to take down the larger prey. For evolutionary efficiency, if size isn't needed, it is almost never selected for. The point is that there is so much prey in their size range, there is no reason to evolve bigger. You have the predator/prey dinamic all wrong as well. You only need to look at rabbit populations in the US. They breeding rate is incredible. However, as opposed to eating themselves into starvation, when their numbers rise, more of their predators move into the area until the numbers are greatly reduced and their predators move to the next area with high numbers. Thus you get this cycle of high prey numbers leading to high predator numbers leading to low prey number leading to low predator numbers leading to high prey numbers. This is far more likely to happen than cats growing in size. Add in that the overwhelming majority of these cats are much smaller than a Maine Coon cat. They aren't getting larger, they are within the typical range of domestic house cats of which they decend from.
Sorry to pile on, but that's not how it works. First off, the natural evolution of any animal can not take place over a few hundred years. It requires adaptive genetic mutations that are based on changes in their environment over hundreds of millennia or even millions of years. Secondly, we know a cat with no predators and unlimited food will become fatter, but not bigger by generation.
I have seen a photograph of a feral cat hanging from a tree with feral dogs. The unusual thing was the feral cat was larger than the feral dogs hanging there with it. My guess would be the feral cat weighing between 10-12kgs maybe slightly heavier, I dispose of any I can get a bead on.
Should bring back the Komodo Dragon so Australia can have an apex predator culling the invasive species. Komodo Dragon is originally from Australia so it would be a right fit.
We keep a litter of feral kittens here , in California and this kittens have to 10- 12 kilos. These kittens came from what our vet says are a long line of crossbreeding , in the wild . We have a miniature poodle and she’s quite a bit smaller , than the cats. The smallest cat is 10 kilos , all feral. These cats have longer, stronger looking teeth . Claws are larger the poodles feet
I live in Appalachia, Virginia, and I have seen at least three feral cats in the woods behind my house. They are not bobcats or mountain lions. I have seen them, and they are three big feral cats that probably weigh 15-20 pounds. I have been trying to catch them in a cage trap but have had no success yet, but there is a pound near me that has been there before I was alive, so they may be the reason why they are hear but i think they are doing the same thing as the ones in Australia, they have taken out almost every single one of our chicken populations, and I seen a lot fewer squirrels, muskrats, and groundhogs siches I have first spotted them on my land
James, Thank you for imparting this information. I have been considering whether or not to make a video about feral cats in Appalachia. There is another UA-camr who is very adamant about the existence of an “Appalachian long-tail” cat with very similar origins as our feral cats in Australia.
The thing is Australian cats do have predators, Dingos/Feral Dogs have been shown to almost completely extirpate cats from regions they recolonize. Even foxes & birds of prey have been shown to reduce cat numbers by preying on kittens...
That is a myth that has been disproven. Dingoes very rarely, if at all, impact feral cat influence in their shared ecosystems. They can successfully uproot foxes, but not cats.
@@eclectic.explorations Really? From what I found it's the opposite, Foxes tend to deal with Dingos/Feral Dogs better than Cats when it comes to avoiding predation.
Thanks for the video. Vey interesting. Maybe those cats didn't come only from Europe but also from Asia via foreign traders in the 19th century. When I lived in Shanghai I adopted a stray kitten. Looks almost like a bengal (quite logical since the bengal is a cross breed between an asian cat and a western one) and it weighs over 7Kg.
Interestingly enough, the "Dragon Li" (Chinese landrace breed of the domestic cat) is believed to derive from a separate domestication event of the Chinese mountain cat.
So the experts state feral cats could weigh 7.-15 kgs . Yet melanistic leopards , ( panthers ) weigh around 40-50 kgs , it’s hard to explain a true comparison.
@rhombifer566 some invasive species are a success story. In this case it would be invasive tackling another invasive. Apart from anything else, if New Zealand imported them, imports could be collared, radio tagged and monitored. It's a bigger problem in Australia because these ferals were left to get out of control and there's huge vast area in the centre of the continent uninhabited by man... there's almost no telling how many of these super evolved ferals there are. And besides, the dingo isn't native to Australia but they're now protected anyway. Bottom line is that this new species of cat now exists and jumping to the conclusion of culling them all, might be rash.
"are we talking 4kg? 5kg?" bro my pet cat cats over 10kg in winter when she bulks up for the cold, in summer sits at 7-8kg (shes a stray rag doll/main coone cross though)
There's much bigger felines out there! Definitely not moggies. I have pics of prints in mud from 1 I saw in Melbourne. I didn't press record on Ir binoculars. But went next morning n found print's as it rained shortly after.
In the far future, two species of post humans will evolve, the first called Slags are a mashup of all human races with greatly reduced metal capacity due to heavy reliance on A.I. and subsistance on Junk Food. They will be easy prey to Giant Feral Cats which will evolve to the size of a Lion. The second will be the barbarous Mole People who quite illegally do not use cell phones and remember how to use fire. Their mythology considers Elon Musk to be a demon who escaped to Mars with a third of humanity's engineers.
One of my cats is 28lbs and not obese. That doesn't seem giant to me. Yeah, I get a lot of cats are smaller, one of my females is 8.6lbs. My "giant" cat isn't giant though and nowhere near the size of a Border Collie lol, more like a slightly larger miniature schnauzer, which would absolutely ragdoll him. Until they start hitting a lean 35-40lbs and are knee high I really wouldn't call them giants or freaks, they're just feral cats that are eating good. Once they get to Lynx size or Serval size then I'd say that's a giant cat.. as far as domestic cats go.
It is a massive assumption that cats will begin to cannibalize house cats and isolate sexually due to size difference, especially when there is essentially an infinite amount of genetic flow adding house cat genes to the feral cat gene pool as they run away from there owners. These genes would be carried all the way to more remote locations through other generations of feral cats that occur closer to civilisation. Not only would a remote population have to isolate sexually from house cats but also isolate sexually from other feral cat populations if they were to speciate
My guess is they left to their own will become leopard size creatures in about 10000 years. So cat evolution is fast! And they become super predators very soon!
Blame the Rabbits, they allowed the feral cats to cross the desert regions and spread to all the regions of the country, yes they are a prey for the wild foxes but it seems that they were successfull to defend themselves by growing bigger.
So u telling me the settlers wiped out entire species, but they have the nerve to say their hunting cats cause their wiping out birds , Australia and new Zealand I feel bad for yawl
Have you seen the size of Alsatian dogs protecting the military bases? Because they are developed from wolves so why shouldn't cats fall back to their ancestors?
Predators of some type are normal and beneficial in most ecosystems. Australia had native predators until humans killed them in the recent past. So why are the non-native predators such a big problem? Aren't they merely performing the same ecological role that the native predators performed until recently?
No predators are not normal in the Australian environment, THAT is what makes Australia different. Cats actually massacre all small animals, killing arround 20 to 30 small animal every week. YES the cat as a predator in a country like Australia is BIG problem.
@@soundman6645 Why are cats having a different or worse effect than the native predators which lived in Australia for millions of years until they were eliminated by humans in the last hundred years or so?
@@NathanLGrossmanit’s because the prey animals adapted to the predators that Australia had but they don’t have any defence against cats because they didn’t evolve with the style of predator that a cat is. On top of that prey species greatly out numbered the amount of big predator species in Australia so many prey animals haven’t adapted to have good response to bigger predators.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. If it were true, this would be the case for any feral cat population living in favorable conditions worldwide. I've worked with ferals for a long time. They are not getting bigger. It would require genetic mutations that prove adaptive over hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions. The only way ferals could grow in size by generation is if they interbreed with bobcats. This is a change in sub species, not an adaptive genetic variation.
FFS!!!! These big cats are only sometimes being found that are the size of an average Maine Coon cat. There is nothing large about them and they are not turbo-evolving and the overwhelming majority are well within the range of a typical house cat. Please do a bit more research before making yourself looks so uninformed online.
I've seen a black feral cat the size of my red heeler and I've seen a melanistic leopard free roaming, both on a former property in SA I was living on. A huge feral cat still looks nothing more than a huge feral cat no matter how big. A free roaming leopard looks absolutely nothing like a free roaming feral cat in size shape movement and appearance. You know what you see even if those who didn't will tell you they know what you saw. The big black tom walking across the road just looked like a normal everyday oversized feral moggy in every way. Not even close to the appearance of a melanistic leopard.
There is one photo in this video that explains exactly why feral cats have spread so rapidly with no competition. A dingo hanging with feral cats. We've removed and continue to removed the original apex predator and the one species that controls and removes invasive predators. Where Dingoes remain native species remain, where Dingoes have been removed from only roos feral herbivores feral cats and foxes remain with local extinction of almost all smaller native animals. Are a few farmers sheep worth a landscape stripped bare by uncontrolled herbivores devoid of native animals just so a farmer can make an extra couple of hundred at most dollars extra profit while the rest of Australia is blown away in dust?
I've seen one in the suburbs of Melbourne. My body completely cramped up in fright. I have pics of its prints in mud. As big as my ✋️ .
@@Richard-gy1pq Utube's been playing games and deleting my replies so this is a waste of time probably.
The prints left by the one we watched were 125mm wide. (12•5cm)
@@FromTheGong I can't read all of the comment. Glitchtube playing up
I just have to say that one would be surprised as to how many people mistake feral cats for their larger relatives, even in places in which these larger feline species live.
@@eliletts8149 And you know this. How ?
Rabbits, toads, camels, foxes, Englishmen...
0:32 CAT GAP…..
sounds like…..
a store in Japan where Cat lovers buy 🎁 gifts and clothes for their cats. 🐈
Them Khajiits really be evolving.
Australia made mistakes with the emu, the Tasmanian tiger...rabbits, toads...they are gonna drop the ball with cats also.
Emus are native to the continent.
@LaurenceDay-d2p the Australian government allowed people to machine gun them, look up the Australian emu war...there's videos about it on UA-cam.
People are toxic
@@LaurenceDay-d2p the Aussie government went to war with the emus and tried to delete them.
Humans are Australia’s biggest invasive species.
I wonder how large those cats will get. With no natrual predators and unlimited amounts of food. Evolution will select for bigger and stronger cats. In a couple of hundred years those cats will reach enormous proportions. Absolutely fascinating in my opinion.
Wrong.
Predators only gain size when their prey does and they need the bulk to take down the larger prey. For evolutionary efficiency, if size isn't needed, it is almost never selected for. The point is that there is so much prey in their size range, there is no reason to evolve bigger.
You have the predator/prey dinamic all wrong as well. You only need to look at rabbit populations in the US. They breeding rate is incredible. However, as opposed to eating themselves into starvation, when their numbers rise, more of their predators move into the area until the numbers are greatly reduced and their predators move to the next area with high numbers. Thus you get this cycle of high prey numbers leading to high predator numbers leading to low prey number leading to low predator numbers leading to high prey numbers. This is far more likely to happen than cats growing in size.
Add in that the overwhelming majority of these cats are much smaller than a Maine Coon cat. They aren't getting larger, they are within the typical range of domestic house cats of which they decend from.
Sorry to pile on, but that's not how it works. First off, the natural evolution of any animal can not take place over a few hundred years. It requires adaptive genetic mutations that are based on changes in their environment over hundreds of millennia or even millions of years. Secondly, we know a cat with no predators and unlimited food will become fatter, but not bigger by generation.
Cats still do. They live on top on people ya fools ❤😂😅🎉 I have three
I have seen a photograph of a feral cat hanging from a tree with feral dogs. The unusual thing was the feral cat was larger than the feral dogs hanging there with it. My guess would be the feral cat weighing between 10-12kgs maybe slightly heavier, I dispose of any I can get a bead on.
Our 'domestic' cat descended from bigger wild cats. It is logical that their now feral descendants would go back to their wild origins
Domestic cats were bred from Felis Sylvestris Lybica in North Africa. They are only slightly larger than typical house cats.
Should bring back the Komodo Dragon so Australia can have an apex predator culling the invasive species. Komodo Dragon is originally from Australia so it would be a right fit.
We keep a litter of feral kittens here , in California and this kittens have to 10- 12 kilos. These kittens came from what our vet says are a long line of crossbreeding , in the wild . We have a miniature poodle and she’s quite a bit smaller , than the cats. The smallest cat is 10 kilos , all feral. These cats have longer, stronger looking teeth . Claws are larger the poodles feet
I live in Appalachia, Virginia, and I have seen at least three feral cats in the woods behind my house. They are not bobcats or mountain lions. I have seen them, and they are three big feral cats that probably weigh 15-20 pounds. I have been trying to catch them in a cage trap but have had no success yet, but there is a pound near me that has been there before I was alive, so they may be the reason why they are hear but i think they are doing the same thing as the ones in Australia, they have taken out almost every single one of our chicken populations, and I seen a lot fewer squirrels, muskrats, and groundhogs siches I have first spotted them on my land
James,
Thank you for imparting this information. I have been considering whether or not to make a video about feral cats in Appalachia. There is another UA-camr who is very adamant about the existence of an “Appalachian long-tail” cat with very similar origins as our feral cats in Australia.
The thing is Australian cats do have predators, Dingos/Feral Dogs have been shown to almost completely extirpate cats from regions they recolonize. Even foxes & birds of prey have been shown to reduce cat numbers by preying on kittens...
That is a myth that has been disproven. Dingoes very rarely, if at all, impact feral cat influence in their shared ecosystems. They can successfully uproot foxes, but not cats.
@@eclectic.explorations Really? From what I found it's the opposite, Foxes tend to deal with Dingos/Feral Dogs better than Cats when it comes to avoiding predation.
Fascinating evolution in action.
最終的には300キロぐらいになってトラとかライオンになっていくのかにゃ～
Thanks for the video. Vey interesting. Maybe those cats didn't come only from Europe but also from Asia via foreign traders in the 19th century. When I lived in Shanghai I adopted a stray kitten. Looks almost like a bengal (quite logical since the bengal is a cross breed between an asian cat and a western one) and it weighs over 7Kg.
Interestingly enough, the "Dragon Li" (Chinese landrace breed of the domestic cat) is believed to derive from a separate domestication event of the Chinese mountain cat.
Lol cats dominate humans 🤣😅😂🎉❤ they run my house for sure. Dogs love them too. They seem to run humans too. Ahha ❤❤❤
It was only a matter of time until cats colonised humans on every continent.
I love it when AI voices shout facts angrily at me with zero inflection. But keep trying, please!
people keep saying no predators, um Dingo ?
Could be wrong but I don’t think dogs usually view cats as prey/food
I think that feral cats in Australia quickly evolved to be too large to be threatened by dingos, which are dogs.
@@morrisonreed1 Most of the Dingoes have been wiped out because of perceived threat to sheep.
It's in the video
@@georgemiller151 there is also the breeding competition ,big cat wins .
Looks like they are getting as big as bobcats
すでに黒豹サイズなんですね😰
That’s the size of a bobcat. A serious predator in the western USA.
We also have bobcats in Pennsylvania
So the experts state feral cats could weigh 7.-15 kgs . Yet melanistic leopards , ( panthers ) weigh around 40-50 kgs , it’s hard to explain a true comparison.
Gympie is not remote, it is a coastal inland city on the main coastal highway.
Soso leyyy 😂🤣😂🤣
New Zealand are desperate to rid themselves of wallabies... perhaps these feral mega cats could be exported there
New Zealand already has similar formidably-sized introduced cats in the wild that I have discussed.
@eclectic.explorations new to your channel. I'll watch more of your videos
you don't get it do you
@rhombifer566 some invasive species are a success story. In this case it would be invasive tackling another invasive. Apart from anything else, if New Zealand imported them, imports could be collared, radio tagged and monitored. It's a bigger problem in Australia because these ferals were left to get out of control and there's huge vast area in the centre of the continent uninhabited by man... there's almost no telling how many of these super evolved ferals there are. And besides, the dingo isn't native to Australia but they're now protected anyway.
Bottom line is that this new species of cat now exists and jumping to the conclusion of culling them all, might be rash.
"are we talking 4kg? 5kg?"
bro my pet cat cats over 10kg in winter when she bulks up for the cold, in summer sits at 7-8kg (shes a stray rag doll/main coone cross though)
There's much bigger felines out there! Definitely not moggies. I have pics of prints in mud from 1 I saw in Melbourne. I didn't press record on Ir binoculars. But went next morning n found print's as it rained shortly after.
Bigger than my ✋️
In the far future, two species of post humans will evolve, the first called Slags are a mashup of all human races with greatly reduced metal capacity due to heavy reliance on A.I. and subsistance on Junk Food. They will be easy prey to Giant Feral Cats which will evolve to the size of a Lion. The second will be the barbarous Mole People who quite illegally do not use cell phones and remember how to use fire. Their mythology considers Elon Musk to be a demon who escaped to Mars with a third of humanity's engineers.
One of my cats is 28lbs and not obese. That doesn't seem giant to me. Yeah, I get a lot of cats are smaller, one of my females is 8.6lbs. My "giant" cat isn't giant though and nowhere near the size of a Border Collie lol, more like a slightly larger miniature schnauzer, which would absolutely ragdoll him. Until they start hitting a lean 35-40lbs and are knee high I really wouldn't call them giants or freaks, they're just feral cats that are eating good. Once they get to Lynx size or Serval size then I'd say that's a giant cat.. as far as domestic cats go.
It is a massive assumption that cats will begin to cannibalize house cats and isolate sexually due to size difference, especially when there is essentially an infinite amount of genetic flow adding house cat genes to the feral cat gene pool as they run away from there owners. These genes would be carried all the way to more remote locations through other generations of feral cats that occur closer to civilisation. Not only would a remote population have to isolate sexually from house cats but also isolate sexually from other feral cat populations if they were to speciate
飼ってみたい😊
My guess is they left to their own will become leopard size creatures in about 10000 years. So cat evolution is fast! And they become super predators very soon!
We Will be returning to Stone Age even sooner.
Blame the Rabbits, they allowed the feral cats to cross the desert regions and spread to all the regions of the country, yes they are a prey for the wild foxes but it seems that they were successfull to defend themselves by growing bigger.
Darwinian law rules.
So u telling me the settlers wiped out entire species, but they have the nerve to say their hunting cats cause their wiping out birds , Australia and new Zealand I feel bad for yawl
Australia has always been a world leader at bad management!
Have you seen the size of Alsatian dogs protecting the military bases? Because they are developed from wolves so why shouldn't cats fall back to their ancestors?
I mean yall said you had a roo problem, so lets get the cats big enough?
Terrible idea
😂 roo deer goat pig rabbit fox camel horse donkey fox cat cow buffalo! There's a wide variety across Australia.
Predators of some type are normal and beneficial in most ecosystems. Australia had native predators until humans killed them in the recent past. So why are the non-native predators such a big problem? Aren't they merely performing the same ecological role that the native predators performed until recently?
No predators are not normal in the Australian environment, THAT is what makes Australia different.
Cats actually massacre all small animals, killing arround 20 to 30 small animal every week.
YES the cat as a predator in a country like Australia is BIG problem.
@@soundman6645 Why are cats having a different or worse effect than the native predators which lived in Australia for millions of years until they were eliminated by humans in the last hundred years or so?
@@NathanLGrossmanit’s because the prey animals adapted to the predators that Australia had but they don’t have any defence against cats because they didn’t evolve with the style of predator that a cat is. On top of that prey species greatly out numbered the amount of big predator species in Australia so many prey animals haven’t adapted to have good response to bigger predators.
That other video’s voice was unbearable.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. If it were true, this would be the case for any feral cat population living in favorable conditions worldwide. I've worked with ferals for a long time. They are not getting bigger. It would require genetic mutations that prove adaptive over hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions. The only way ferals could grow in size by generation is if they interbreed with bobcats. This is a change in sub species, not an adaptive genetic variation.
FFS!!!! These big cats are only sometimes being found that are the size of an average Maine Coon cat. There is nothing large about them and they are not turbo-evolving and the overwhelming majority are well within the range of a typical house cat.
Please do a bit more research before making yourself looks so uninformed online.