Comment by lukan
14 days ago
I would argue, with tigers they wanted to kill, when they did.
Humans don't die so easily.
Cats can in general play without (seriously) hurting one another or a human.
On the other hand, even a small cat could kill a human by going to the throat, which they could. But they don't. The house cat evolved to manipulate us instead to get what they want, instead of eating and killing us. Those cats that tried that, like tigers, got allmost extinct. And from what I know, there are bigger limits to what a tiger will do, instead of a house cat. And yes, they are bigger and any bad mood of them allways very dangerous.
I wouldn't anthropomorphize wild animals kept as pets. Such animals aren't thinking about killing, per se, nor are they attacking things because they're in a bad mood. They're driven by instincts and those instincts, which are generally involve killing anything they can, sometimes just inappropriately click on.
For instance we were introducing one of our cats to a new stray kitten we found. We've done this plenty of times before and are used to the process including having them play footsie under the door for weeks, reading positive body language (tail posture, etc) and so on. It was all positive. So we let them see each other. Everything was going really well until the kitten decided to boldly just march up to the cat.
Something just clicked in her at that point. The cat, the most docile and friendly cat imaginable, just pounced and decided she was going to wreck the kitten. After separating her we assumed it was her way of trying to roughly assert dominance, reminding the kitten she was being a bit too familiar. That was until we were treating the kitten and saw the bite marks were in the throat area - she would have 100% killed the kitten if we had acted half a second more slowly.
After that she was all back to being nice and friendly outside the door, but we decided to find the kitten a new home instead of risking being a bit too slow the second time.
We shouldn't generalize from house cats to tigers either. A tiger's brain is a lot bigger than a cat's, and there may be more space for deliberate actions in it.