Several years ago a cat named Tardar Sauce captured the world’s heart. You may know the cat better by their nickname, ‘Grumpy Cat.’
Tardar Sauce’s apparently cranky visage was suspected to be due to feline dwarfism. There is a much crankier cat species out there, and it’s not just their face.
Today’s Moment of Science… in Soviet Russia, cat grumps you!
The manul is a badass motherfucking small wild cat roaming Siberia and the Himalayas like it’s goddamn easy. The grumpiest of cats, they lived just out of view of humans for millennia. First described in 1776 by naturalist Peter Pallas, they’re also known as Pallas’s cat.
Relatively small at 45-65cm long (that’s about two feet for Americans), they’re compact balls of cranky with powerful muscles and extremely thick coats of fur. Though it’s easy to mistake them for adorable chubby kitties at first glance, that’s actually several inches of fur that allows them to thrive in -50 degree winters. The scientific name for its genus is Otocolobus, roughly meaning ‘ugly ears.’ Which is just mean because would you just goddamn look at those adorable little ears?
With an appearance not entirely unlike the grandfather of every cat in existence, their fixed expression of ‘get off my lawn’ matches their demeanor; they’re cute, but they goddamn hate you, and they’re aggressive. To support their anti-human lifestyle, these fluffballs with sharp ends evolved to be really good at keeping themselves the fuck away from us. Excellent natural camouflage and a nocturnal lifestyle has sometimes hindered our ability to conduct studies on them in nature.
You can’t blame them for avoiding us; for a long time, their main predators were fur trappers in China, Russia, and Mongolia. In the 1970s, hunting them was outlawed virtually everywhere except Mongolia, and now their overall population is stable (with a few countries where they’re still considered threatened or endangered).
Pallas’s cats hunt pikas, and in the 2000s there was a campaign to rid the Tibetan Plateau of pikas. So the theory went, pikas were contributing to degradation of the grassland. It’s more likely their abundant population was a result of that degradation, and pika burrowing was a vital part of the ecosystem. The campaign killed approximately 50,000 tons of pikas, causing ripples of damage up the food chain. Pika poisoning is considered a known threat to the manuls.
Humans aren’t the only predator of this wild cat. However, as Siberia’s longtime hide and seek champions, they use burrows and small rock caves for safety. As ambush predators, they also stalk the entrances to those burrows, waiting for snacks to amble on out.
All that said, I don’t want to give those ears a scritch, adorable, ugly, or otherwise. These grumps are dangerous animals that happen to have kitty cat faces. Play with them at your own risk knowing they’ll play a game of ‘gotchyernose’ that ends with them getting your nose.
This has been your moment of science, not planning to ‘pspspspsps’ anywhere in Siberia just to be on the safe side.
The people who’d met Grumpy Cat said he was about the sweetest cat who ever lived.
Pallas’ cat? Not so. They’re born pissed-off and get worse with age.