It is worth noting that cats
have really small lungs, and if they fail to connect with that prey and to take it down quickly, they give up. So if you've got a long head start, you're going to outrun it. My name's Mark Elbroch. I've been studying mountain
lions for 20 years, and I've been lucky enough to also work with African lions and leopards. Today, we're going to be
looking at big-cat attacks in movies and judging how real they are. Where they stand up to begin
a wrestling is actually real. African lions will do that
when they engage in a fight, especially over territory
or rights to a pride. Young lions actually challenge old lions. That's totally real. And that old lions almost always have a set
of scars on their face from these territorial disputes over time. That's totally normal. To see an old lion without any scars means that lion has
been bred in captivity. The swiping of the paws, all of that sort of rapid violence is very real. I would just point out,
too, that the skin of cats, when you see them, they often look loose. They're swiping with these weapons, these claws that can
dig in an inch or more, and that loose skin is protecting them, the big mane is protecting them, so that all is defenses to allow them to have
these violent exchanges. There was a moment there where
you saw one go onto his back. That's really normal. A cat in a defensive posture
will start to go onto its back to have four weapons pointing up. They are devastating because now, if a competitor comes on top of them, they just shred their underbelly,
with all the vital organs. It's amazing to have that
much realism in a cartoon, so I'm going to give this thing an eight. This is a pet animal, a pet tiger. There are more tigers in
captivity in the US alone than there are wild tigers
in the entire world, and that's just a crazy thing to ponder. The ears were forward. You always watch the ears of cats. And so this was not a threatened animal, it wasn't an agitated
animal, it was just chilling. Stu: This does not seem fair. Phil: It's rock, paper, scissors.
There's nothing more fair. Interesting idea to try to drug the tiger. In fact, I know people who have
tried this on wild animals. They use syringes and
load them up with drugs. I've seen that work in the field. So that's real. I mean, real-ish, depending what they're giving it. Oh, my God! When you saw the tiger
chewing on the seat, we call those displacement behaviors. A lot of captive animals
exhibit sort of stress in different ways, and so they'll bite things,
they'll claw things. You know, I'm going to
give this movie a five. Oh, dear Santo. Note the pattern here, that there's sort of black
squares with dots in them. And that's really important
to identifying a jaguar and differentiating it from a leopard, which has no black dots in the middle. I've seen this movie, so
I know the context of it, and so I know that the jaguar is a pet. The owner has trained this cat to engage in wrestling matches. Would a jaguar wander into a bar to get a raw steak or to engage people? Absolutely not. In fact, jaguars, among all the big cats, have the least records of attacking people in the wild. It's almost unheard of. If that were a real fight and the jaguar were truly to bite down, it could quite literally
bite through his arm. They have tremendous biting power as compared to other cats of similar size. [jaguar purring] I'm going to pet you now, and you're not going
to eat me, understood? You know, Hollywood loves its noises, and in this case, it
has the jaguar purring. Jaguars can roar, but they cannot purr, so that, of course, is
completely unrealistic. I'm going to give this a four. It's got tremendous comedy
and poor natural history. Hey, buddy. Huh, huh? You a little scary kitty, huh? That's a real mountain lion kitten. All cats are born with blue eyes. The pigments haven't started
to develop in their eyes yet. You can see this kitten
has been handled plenty. It's not agitated. Its ears are forward. To me, I would call that a smiling kitty. [mountain lion roars] Mountain lions can't roar,
so they were often considered the largest of the small cats. An agitated mountain
lion would be hissing. They go [hisses], and then
they, often, they'll snort. Like, as they pull the
air back in to hiss again, they'll go [snorts] and go [snorts]. Oh, my God. [mountain lion growls] Help! Help! This is one of the first clips in which we've seen a cat drop its head and lower the front half of its body, and that's exactly what a wildcat does when it is preparing to pounce. What would a mountain lion really do if it was defending its kittens? It's all about bluster. They'll false-charge you. They make noise. It would be an incredibly rare thing that they would actually make contact, because in a fight they are vulnerable, and the best thing for the safety of their own kittens is to stay alive. Oh! Oh, my God I mean, there's so much to talk about. The cat's enormous to Kevin, and I know Kevin Hart is not a huge man. So, a typical female, especially
in Southern California, is going to be, like, 80 pounds. That cat is huge compared
to what it should be. Oh. Oh, my God. How she even dropped to the ground and let go of him is
totally not mountain lion. When a cat attaches to
something it's attacking, they do not let go.
Like, they are attached, and they'll go down with their prey. They've actually been
seen rolling off mountains attached to a bighorn sheep or some other prey and rolling together. To the jugular! Is that an EpiPen? He's not jabbing it in the jugular. He's jabbing it in the
shoulder, which would be the least effective form of defense. The neck would've been good, or the eye. People often recommend, if
a cat is actually attacking, you go for the eye. I'm going to give this one a five. African lions, the largest ones, are almost as large as the largest tigers. There are records of up to 600 pounds, but they exhibit extreme dimorphism, and that's a fancy word
for saying the males are a lot bigger than the females. When I've been in the field
and confronted a lion, when they stand up, their
eyes are essentially even with your chest, which
is incredibly intimidating. This is hard to watch. This reminds me of, is it "The Revenant" that
has Leonardo DiCaprio? That bear scene was just
brutal in its ferocity, and this is, I mean, this is the most
realistic attack we've seen. I think he's on his back. They often go for the spine, big cats, when they're attacking any kind of prey. And you notice this lion is biting a lot. We haven't seen that in these other clips. Lots of clawing, which, as I talked about, is more about wounding. This is a lion going for a kill. This clip is as real as it gets. I'm going to give it a solid eight, and it loses two points in just the impact on the person who was
at the receiving end. You know, the devastation of that attack would have been lethal. [mountain lion growls and yowls] What the hell? Reese: But if you're scared,
that beautiful death machine will do what God made it to do. This part of that clip is actually real. You know, that if you keep
showing fear to a mountain lion or to another big cat,
you're setting yourself up for a potentially dangerous situation. You never want to give
a cat the opportunity to what I call gain momentum. They'll become bolder,
and they'll continue to do whatever they're doing to make you afraid. Most folks will recommend
you take two fast steps towards it. Like, you step
towards it, and I'll clap. I'll stomp my feet, I'll be
loud, I'll be aggressive, and they'll usually just be like, "Whoa," and then they'll leave. God, he's just following me wherever I go. Reese: Well, he's just looking at you. That's actually a really
cool thing to talk about, because cats lock on their prey. To get them to break that
focal lock is really important if you were to ever be in
an encounter with a big cat, which you can do by yelling, screaming, doing something surprising. Hey, here we go. I'm getting in. [mountain lion growls and hisses] The sound at the end,
that [growls and hisses], it's so funny because it's
the ringtone on my phone, because that is one of the most overused popular sounds of mountain lions. I love the fact they talked
about fear. We'll give it a six. [tiger roars] The greatest problem with
Hollywood cat attacks are the noises. First off, cats are completely
silent when they're hunting. You don't let your prey
know you're coming. When that tiger emerges and hits the wolf, that's actually a really important thing to note about cat hunting, is
that they use their bodies, not just their claws and their teeth. Sometimes, if they can get
enough power behind themselves, just their weight alone can
break the neck of an animal. You should never run. That's like triggering the prey response in a large carnivore. You want to confront a large
cat that is confronting you. If it's threatening you.
You want to scare it. But let's just assume that you're running. You know, you've made that decision. It is worth noting that
cats have really small lungs and that they have these short bursts. That's why they're
explosive when they hunt. And if they fail to connect with that prey and to take it down quickly, they give up. So if you've got a long head start and you could get that
cat to run for, you know, half mile or so, yeah,
you're going to outrun it, because humans are actually
built for marathon runs. There's no way he could stand up to being clawed several times. So, cat claws are protractible,
and that means that when the cat is relaxed,
they're actually sheathed. You don't see the claws. And
that keeps them razor sharp so that when they capture
prey or swipe prey, they immediately cut
in and cut lacerations, like sharp knives. Just
one swipe of a tiger's claw would completely debilitate this guy. I'm going to give this one a seven. Come on! Come on! Come on! Will a tiger defend food from a potential scavenger? Absolutely, and lions too, and mountain lions too, and leopards too. They'll all do that. It has the tiger's ears out to the side, and that is an uncomfortable animal. That is an agitated animal. It is telling the world in every way that it is very unhappy
with its current situation. Pi takes to water for safety, right? He leaps off the boat, and if
the tiger were locked on him, like, truly hunting him, that probably wouldn't have saved him because tigers swim and swim quite well. But in this case, as I mentioned, the tiger didn't seem to be locked on him. I'm going to give this clip an eight because the CGI is amazing. That could happen. I've seen mountain lions kill bear cubs on a couple of occasions. In terms of how it would
hunt in open terrain, the most similar sort
of scenario I've seen is in the far south out in
the Patagonia grasslands, and a mountain lion would
be down low, using every bit of grass or rock to get
as close as possible. They wouldn't betray their presence. Now, if they thought that
prey was totally vulnerable, which a young bear might be, then sure, you'll see cats nonchalantly approach prey that cannot get away. We can appreciate this is
an actual mountain lion but that this is a cat that
is clearly uncomfortable and is not his hunting. Would a mountain lion, confronted with an adult brown bear, turn and flee? Absolutely. You know, mountain lions
will always choose the exit rather than engage
unless they're cornered, and that gets me a little bit to talk about the habitat here. It's totally open. It's hardly any trees. It's a lot of rock. This is actually not great cat habitat, at least in the north
where you have brown bears, because this is the domain of wolves, and wolves always have the
upper hand in the open. And so cats, when you look at their distribution across North America, they're almost never found
in these wide-open areas. So, we've got real
mountain lions, real bears. I'm still going to give it a seven because the open terrain
doesn't really match. My favorite big-cat-attack scene from today would be from "Me Time." Part of my enjoyment of that clip was how poorly it was done in terms of CGI and the interaction between
Kevin Hart's character and the actual mountain lion. Thanks so much for watching, and if you're felining it, please click on the video above.
