They called you exotic. Which is just people talk for awesome.

May 20, 2016 3:22 PM

Coyote Peterson, host of wildlife TV show Brave Wilderness, was hunting for spiders at night on a trail through Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula when he encountered a very different kind of creature.
posted by scalefree (47 comments total)

Look at his little spots! Look at his tufted ears!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 3:29 PM on May 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

BABOU!
posted by thecjm at 3:31 PM on May 20, 2016 [15 favorites]

So cute. Mixed feelings though, because humans and wild animals should not interact like that--it often ends badly for the wild animal.
posted by agatha_magatha at 3:32 PM on May 20, 2016 [18 favorites]

"He's crepuscular, get him boys!"
posted by zachlipton at 3:37 PM on May 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

We called it exotic because calling it "CDN $40,000 in fines" was unwieldy.
posted by Malory Archer at 3:43 PM on May 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

Alas, I have never had an ocelot on my head.
posted by sarcasticah at 3:44 PM on May 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Adorbs! Also, constantly afraid that suddenly the shot would be blotted out in a wave of blood.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:54 PM on May 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

Want baby ocelot of my very own! kidding. Sort of.
posted by bologna on wry at 3:55 PM on May 20, 2016

I will call him ALOT and pet him very nicely.
posted by bologna on wry at 3:58 PM on May 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

A KITTY
posted by poffin boffin at 4:02 PM on May 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

I can't watch the whole video right now, but that can't be a purely wild animal. I won't be surprised if it turns out to have been an orphan raised by humans and then let loose.
posted by King Sky Prawn at 4:07 PM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I had a handful of unplanned encounters with lynx this fall. (I was at a field camp in the Yukon.) I was so surprised by how curious they were; true to cat form! (Also true to cat form, they really love shiny and jangly objects.) I'm used to big animals just booking it when you get near them, but the lynx I saw would often come towards me, stalk me, bob their heads to mirror mine. It was really fun to be with them. Any bigger of a cat and I would have worried about whether they could hurt you, but I was just happy for them to get as close as they wanted.

Here's the closest photo I got of one. Of course, a month after that a lynx walked within five feet of me, but it was during the one week my camera was out of commission 😦
posted by little onion at 4:10 PM on May 20, 2016 [28 favorites]

that can't be a purely wild animal

He says in the video, "This is a wild cat, however, she is used to humans. She hangs out on this trail and we were told it you take this trail at night, there's a good chance that you could come across her."
posted by little onion at 4:12 PM on May 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

Wait: did he actually say they were out 'herping," making a verb out of "herpetology"? Sorry but, that's just not allowed.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:12 PM on May 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

He explains in the video that the ocelot really is wild but has become socialized to humans walking the trail they found her on.
posted by scalefree at 4:13 PM on May 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

So beautiful! The slinkiest cat I've seen yet.

And speaking of slinky, I think cats often end up imitating snakes in their environment, and that ocelot has some pretty distinctive spots, so I Googled 'costa rican python.'

What do you think?
posted by jamjam at 4:14 PM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

"herping," making a verb out of "herpetology." Sorry but, that's just not allowed.

Not only is it allowed, I believe it's used frequently by herpetologists!
posted by little onion at 4:17 PM on May 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

That is wonderful, thanks for linking it! Such a kitten!

Interesting that she was panting (?), or having her tongue out so much - I thought dogs pant but cats don't.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:23 PM on May 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Is that ocelot panting? Do wild cats pant?
posted by tau_ceti at 4:24 PM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

@little onion: Don't mind me: I was just out gramming---that's looking for interesting grammatical (mis)constructions, in case anyone was wondering.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:26 PM on May 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

Not only is it allowed, I believe it's used frequently by herpetologists!

Can confirm. Source: My labmate is a herpetologist, is currently teaching Field Herpetology, and takes his classes on herping trips every day. Night herping is even more fun!!

Field work, bah
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 4:34 PM on May 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

Wild cats do pant, especially when they are super hot in the rain forest, but she might also have been smelling a lot of things that she wanted to smell. Not quite a classic flehmen response, though.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 4:39 PM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I do worry about what happens when she's full grown. I'm guessing people on the trail sometimes feed her, thus her getting so socialized to humans. And it's not going to be as cute when fifty pounds of cat pounces on someone's pack, expecting a treat.
posted by tavella at 4:40 PM on May 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

Q: How do you titillate an ocelot?

A: Oscillate its tit a lot.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:57 PM on May 20, 2016 [29 favorites]

i have seen supposedly domesticated cats who were wilder than that ocelot
posted by pyramid termite at 6:31 PM on May 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Aw dammit Greg_Ace you beat me to it. I've always marveled at that joke. Who was the person who realized "ocelot," "titillate," "oscillate," and "tits" could be put together? I want to shake their hand.
posted by gusandrews at 6:59 PM on May 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

I bet someone's been grooming her on a regular basis.
posted by maudlin at 7:00 PM on May 20, 2016

I want to shake their hand.

Me too. That joke never fails to make me marvel and laugh at the same time.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:07 PM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

You say socialization, I say exploitation. If it's very lucky the cat will end up in a sanctuary.

As an aside, I found the guy's exaggerated surprise face punch worthy.
posted by -t at 7:11 PM on May 20, 2016

I love how the dude keeps switching back and forth between his Serious Narrator Voice and helpless baby talk. It's like he's aiming for hip young Sir David Attenborough, ready to deploy Informative Wildlife Facts, but then the xkcd Cat Proximity law kicks in.

to be fair in his position i would be only capable of baby talk, possibly interspersed with high-pitched squeals and cooing
posted by karayel at 7:21 PM on May 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

Thanks, scalefree, love of life, humanity, and everything–and cats!–recharged to 1000000000%! YAY WILDNESS KITTY FACE YAY
posted by Mike Mongo at 8:01 PM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I love the ocelot video, and then I start worrying that someone will watch this video and decide ocelots make good pets. Oh brain, why must you ruin everything?
posted by Anonymous at 8:58 PM on May 20, 2016

I love the ocelot video, and then I start worrying that someone will watch this video and decide ocelots make good pets. Oh brain, why must you ruin everything?

Apparently they kind of do. Salvador Dalí had one. And seeing that video, I can see how you could domesticate it to be fairly friendly and a good pet. Not saying you should, but it looks like they do.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:22 PM on May 20, 2016

That ocelot is less bitey than half the domestic cat I've met.
posted by fshgrl at 9:36 PM on May 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

you're a kitty!
posted by you're a kitty! at 10:49 PM on May 20, 2016 [18 favorites]

Although totally cute, the video makes me sad. That kitty is going to get killed when it is larger and starts jumping on people's backs (because people encouraged it as a baby). :(
posted by Halo in reverse at 11:54 PM on May 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Ocelots sold as pets in times past were often defanged and declawed. I recall reading an account of one former owner awaking one night with the jaws of his ocelot clamped on his throat while kicking at him with its back legs.

When I was a child, I used to marvel at why the extreme range in sizes to which dogs were bred was not replicated in cats. Until I cornered and attempted to pick up a kitten from the litter of the barn cat on my grandfather's farm.

Unfortunately it was one of the ones which had not been tamed by my cousins. A lot of blood, all mine, was shed in seconds. 'Weak as a kitten' had a whole new meaning to me after that brief encounter.

Cats are incredibly strong and fierce when aroused. A cat the size of a beagle can be formidable. One the size of a Labrador could be lethal.
posted by y2karl at 3:38 AM on May 21, 2016 [4 favorites]

Thank you for posting this!
posted by duffell at 5:16 AM on May 21, 2016

There is a wonderful blog on tumblr @why-animals-do-the-thing (run by Rachel Garner) which does a great job of explaining all kinds of animal behaviour in some detail
Heres what they say about this:

I just can’t believe that this is okay, either for the ocelot or for the beliefs/behaviors it might encourages for the viewers.

This is so much awful. I checked out the Brave Wilderness channel and all of the videos appear to be in this vein: interacting with wild animals and building up the danger and when he gets hurt by them.

First off, it’s titled ‘ocelot attack’. Great misrepresentation there, asshole. An actual ocelot attack involves some pretty nasty puncture wounds, a lot of bleeding, and some intense antibiotic prescriptions. He’s trying to play this cat off as dangerous and predatory the entire video while joking about it going for his jugular and treating it like a domestic animal. I want to burn things to the ground - specifically, this footage.

But SERIOUSLY? ‘Oh hey I found this wild ocelot and I’m just going to pet it and pick it up and play with it’. In what fucking world is that a good idea or a responsible idea or acceptable in the slightest? Except then he’s like, oh, well, she’s wild but she’s habituated to humans and hangs out on this trail and it’s well known that you’ll encounter her if you walk down it at night. That’s really staged, honestly - when people actually encounter cats like this in the wild, you hear the shock and awe in their voice and they don’t go pick them up and play with them.

Habituated predators are a huge problem, so this sort of interaction is horrible to popularize. After a point they don’t just interact with people - they steal pets or get into the garbage or hurt a person, and then they get put down for it. This cat is only half-grown and is interacting like a juvenile, but this is still an incredibly bad idea - it teaches her that humans can be toys. Play is practice for predatory behavior, so as she gets older her instincts are going to make it much more likely that she’ll hurt the next dumbass who tries this.

I’m incensed about everything in this video. This is enough ‘casual interaction with wildlife’ to make Steve Irwin roll in his grave. Rather than accepting that this predator he’s interacting with could genuinely hurt him, he’s making stupid choices to handle the wildlife and is sooo casual about “taking the risk of a bite or a scratch”. He’s making it seem totally okay through his actions to go fuck with the wildlife and couching it in lip-service of ‘I’m a professional, don’t try this at home kids.’ That’s appalling.

This is not education, this is a dude taking advantage of an opportunity to interact with a wild predator, fulfill some wet dreams on camera, and then play it off as cool and professional for profit. I just can’t. fucking. even.

posted by Lanark at 5:20 AM on May 21, 2016 [19 favorites]

Tunt Manor! On the double!
posted by allthinky at 7:38 AM on May 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I was waiting for some kind of serious lesson on animals by the end, but "wet dreams on camera" seems to be this guy's M.O. :\
posted by gusandrews at 9:19 AM on May 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Cats are incredibly strong and fierce when aroused. A cat the size of a beagle can be formidable. One the size of a Labrador could be lethal.

We've had a couple twenty plus pound cats, one a Maine Coon and the other just a freak of nature. Built like goddamn linebackers. Both cats got a healthy amount of respect and caution from vets. Our vet made the same beagle/retriever comparison, after one of our big boys threw off a towel they were trying to wrap him in and everyone in the room went back up against the wall. "OK, if he can do that I'd say he's not very sick." That cat had a long list of warnings at the top of his file so not to aggravate him.
posted by Ber at 9:09 PM on May 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

A neighbor's kitten got renamed Death by Velcro by her vets.
posted by y2karl at 11:47 AM on May 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Our vet made the same beagle/retriever comparison, after one of our big boys threw off a towel they were trying to wrap him in and everyone in the room went back up against the wall.

Reminds me of one of those many wonderful details from the All Creatures Great and Small books, where the author told of having to capture unwilling angry cats and the technique he developed to deal with them, which involved a hurried wrapping with a bath towel. He noted that his colleagues had been heard to say, "Herriot might be limited in many respects, but by gaw can he wrap a cat!"

I like the video, but I can also see, like the more recent comments have said, that this is going to end in tears, and unfortunately I think the eventual best case for the cat, one that prevents it from attacking trail walkers, is probably zoo life.
posted by JHarris at 1:23 PM on May 22, 2016

We have a cat who's on the large side and who we suspect was semi-feral when we got her from the pound. She's become increasingly intolerant of the vet and the last couple of times she's gone in, she's started making indescribable demon sounds and then they bust out the "gloves of love", great elbow-length steel-staple gauntlets for whatever lucky tech gets to hold her down while the doc does her thing. I always stand well back in the corner, for while she loves me above all others and lets me alone cradle her like a baby and pet her belly, I ain't getting near her when that hell voice comes out of her maw because I could easily see her taking someone's throat out if they lose their grip.

It occurred to me a while ago that "big cats" is a misnomer and really, those are just regular cats with regular default cat behaviors, and the ones we keep at home are just miniaturized versions with the same mentality.
posted by Hal Mumkin at 6:36 PM on May 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

The Garner blog is actually kind of annoying to me, because it starts by freaking out on stuff that is obviously a joke. He's not pretending that he's actually in danger from the cat.

Checking with the San Diego Zoo, it appears that female ocelots top out at about 30 pounds, so she's not going to get much bigger. So I don't think she'll be much of an accidental danger to people; the danger is going to be the other way. Also, watching the video again, I'm mostly convinced that this is a cat that was raised by humans and then dumped on the trail. I've seen habituated animals before, and even occasionally ones that would let people touch them, but a wild-born and wild-raised cat that lets a human pick her up and dangle her around like that? Also, she doesn't seem to be much of a hunter going by the crab video.
posted by tavella at 8:36 PM on May 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

I just went through this again last week. I was out watering when this little kitty started stress meowing behind one if the buildings. Cute little silver tiger with the screechiest scratchiest meows I ever had and, God, was she loud. About the loudest cat I have ever met. And with no collar.

So, I coaxed her out with a can of cat food, wrapped her in my long sleeved arms and took her home.

Only we had a slight struggle in the stairwell on the way in and she sank a canine in my finger. Man, I had to soak my bathmat in cold water after bandaging up...

But I won the argument and herded her in the apartment before jetting off to QFC for kiity litter and a cat pan and stopping off at Fed Ex to write, print and copy off some Found Kitty posters.

And got home to find out she was one of ours, an indoor kitty who slipped out while mom was doing laundry. Well, at least, I have pre-positioned supplies for the next lost kitty.

Of course, digging her out was another fight and the little ingrate left growling at me.
posted by y2karl at 5:50 AM on May 23, 2016 [1 favorite]