why-animals-do-the-thing:

panthxra:

oh that makes more sense ! still have no idea since i havent worked with them lmao but @neofeliis and @whitejenna know better than i tbh 🙂

This popped on my dash while I was sitting at a table full of lifelong cat keepers, so I polled the table. 🙂 How big cats respond to eye contact differs by species, by the body language involved, and by the individual. 

We’ve talked about soft affiliative eye contact vs a hard stare with a number of other species on the blog before, and the rules for that generally still hold true. Soft eye contact or just looking at an animal’s eyes casually isn’t normally confrontational, but a hard or prolonged stare is rude at best and can be aggressive. 

In general, they said, lions are much more sensitive to the type of eye contact and how you’re approaching them – especially male lions. The joke at the table was that it’s like the Godfather: you’re okay if you’re respectful about it, but you better come bearing gifts. 

Tigers are much more variable than lions (and the people I spoke to said they wanted me to clarify they’re mostly talking about hand-raised tigers – they haven’t had a lot of experience with mother-raised tigers). Sometimes they can be super down for prolonged eye-contact, but a hard stare can and often well piss them off. 

Leopards, jaguars and snow leopards basically interpret any eye contact as the fact that they’re visible – which is not their preferred operating state. Leopards and jaguars tend to not be stressed by a prolonged stare very much, but snow leopards will generally find it much more invasive. Everyone cautioned that forcing a hard stare with any of these generally invisible ambush predators is a great way to lose a couple chunks of flesh. EDIT: Not that doing a hard stare with a lion or a tiger won’t also be aggressive and potentially a provocation, but there was emphasis that the other species really don’t like it.