A Cat Tale from China's West

From my colleague Lin Yang:

In September we blogged about a man in southern China named Mr. Li with a “king rat” that he was offering up to battle feline challengers. The "rat," in fact, was a 14-inch-long nutria. I often wonder what happened to him. Did he defeat all his cat combatants and claim his champion title? Perhaps not if Zhang Peiwei, a nomad in western China's Xinjiang region, brought one of his cats.

Zhang found a couple of “wild tabby cats” on the grassland in May and brought them home, according to Yili Radio and TV News. His family adored the kittens and his mother kept them in her bedroom. They grew fast. In two months, they had to move from the house to live in a sheep pen. Like Mr. Li's "rat," the kitties have also brought financial worries to Mr. Zhang. Their appetite has grown from 1-2 kg of meat a day to 4-5 kg, and they aren't interested in being vegetarians.

But an alarming incident has made Mr. Zhang wonder about the cats. “One day in July, when I went to feed the kitties in the sheep pen, I found the remains of a lamb. The kitties ate every bit of meat on it!” he told the Xinjiang newspaper.

The sheep pen is now officially the cat condo. Zhang moved the sheep out and started buying live chickens for the cats. “I suspected they were leopards,” but that was not confirmed until two months later, by a zoologist sent by provincial government. At the moment the two snow leopards are still living with Zhang's family since the “local wild animal rescue center is not equipped for hosting leopards, and they might not survive in the wild,” according to local authorities. But Zhang's mother thinks the family might not survive if they stay on. “Raising them is more complicated than raising a person," she told the paper. "We thought we could make some money selling our chickens this year, but the leopards got most of them."