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.