Photos from top left clockwise: Lion, tiger, leopard and jaguar. Photos by: Kjunstorm, Brian McKay, William Warby and Susan Shepard – all Flickr photographers and reproduced under creative commons licenses.
Big cat toys should be toys that are based on the big four wild cats: tiger, lion, leopard and jaguar. Although I sense that the term, “big cat” is somewhat flexible. It could just mean a big cat and the snow leopard, puma and cheetah are pretty big too. Conventionally though, they are not in the select group of cats that are referred to as the “big cats“.
Or this phrase could simply refer to large cat toys! I have taken it to mean the former and in any case some of the cat toys on this page are large…
With that out of the way, I can focus on presenting some big cat toys. Knowing how tiresome it can be to buy in shops with queues, hassle, noise and this and that I am gradually changing my shopping style.
Amazon is known to be efficient. This is because they are very well organised to the point where I have read stories about employees being pushed a bit too hard. But that is a matter of opinion. When we shop online we need complete security, certainty and speed. In my honest opinion Amazon deliver. The toys below are for the North American market by the way. This is because most visitors to PoC are from this area.
Update 5th September 2015 – Amazon have changed their coding and all the widgets no longer work! Great. I don’t have time to fix them all so I apologies. Thank you for visiting anyway.
Lion Toys
Tiger Toys
Leopard Toys
Jaguar Toys
Cheetah Toys
Some information about big cats and big cat toys:
- I have added the cheetah toys because it is a better known wildcat although not a big cat and there are more toys for that cat!
- Big cats can roar, the others can’t – see Tiger Roar.
- You will find it difficult to see the difference between the jaguar and the leopard in a fluffy toy as they are very similar in real life. The jaguar is a little more stocky and has slightly different spots.
- You will see some black jaguars. These are called melanistic jaguars. They are also called black panthers. The leopard can be black too for the same reasons. The most common use of the phrase, “black panther” refers to black jaguars. Melanism is not uncommon in domestic cat breeds too.
- Jaguars live in South America. Leopards are more widespread and adaptable living in Asia, Middle East and Africa.
- Tigers live in Asia (Siberian tiger habitat). Lions live in Africa (and a small number in north west India).
- When buying big cat toys we should consider giving a bit to the conservation groups as all the wildcats are persecuted in the wild. The tiger is becoming extinct in the wild and only recently it was decided that one more tiger subspecies has become totally extinct – the South China tiger.
