Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Bengal Cats

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

Bengal cats are gorgeous animals, but they are bought and sold on the designer pet market, so booo. Learn about these hybrid kitties today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Josh, there's Chuck, Jerry's here too. Dave's not, but Jerry's here for Dave. You know the whole rigamarole. It's time for short stuff, so let's go. Meow. So, Chuck, I'm glad you did that, because I think that was a really great segue into this episode on the specific kind of cats. That's right. We're talking about the bingle cat. If you've ever seen a bingle cat, or if you look up a picture online now, when it's safe, it looks like a cross between a leopard and a house cat, because that's what it is. Yeah, full stop.

I mean, it's kind of nuts, but there is a small wild leopard cat out there in Southern and Eastern Asia. Priona Illyrius, Bengalensis. Bengalensis. I think I had it in there somewhere. Maybe Jerry can chop all that up and edit it into the correct pronunciation.

But it's a tiny little cat that looks a lot like a leopard and it is a wild cat. It's not a leopard, it's not even related to the leopard, but it's one half of this type of hybridized breed of cats that people keep as pets today. Yeah, that people pay a lot of money for. Oh, I imagine so. Yeah, they people pay a lot of money for. Oh, I imagine so. Yeah.

They are very willful athletic cats and we'll kind of get to their behavior later, but let's go back about six million years to talk about how cats came to be. There were a couple of groups of felines that parted ways. There was a very, you know, just sort of a regular small-bodied cat that was eventually the common ancestor of both of these groups. One became the one that you talked about, the prionelaris, nope.

Yeah, I mean, that was closer to that. Prionelaris. Okay. Maybe. Yeah. Bingolynsis. my idea. Brian Aluris. Okay. Maybe. Yeah. Bingolynisus. No, Bingolensis. You just did what I do.

You added a whole vowel in there. Well, why don't you take the next one? Cause that one's easy. Wild leopard cat. Well, no, I meant the other lineage. The house cat, Felis catus. Yeah, exactly. So those are the two lines.

The Felis catus is what most of us have in our homes that have cats. But that other one, that leopard cat lives in southern and eastern Asia. Like you said, it's a wildcat. It prowls the forest and grasslands and stuff like that. And they're not huge. They're six and a half pounds to maybe fifteen and a half pounds. And although they look like a leopard, they're, you know, like you said, they're clearly not. They're small by comparison. No, but like a leopard, they're covered in rosettes. That's what leopard spots are called.

And then the little plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets. You know those two things? That's a common crossword clue, by the way, aglets. Great. Yeah. If you know those two things, you don't need to know anything else in the world because they'll just kind of open up all of the doors you need from that point on. That's right.

But rosettes, they're the little patches of fur, the little spots that leopards have, and that's one of the main characteristics of the Bengal cat hybrid breed. Do you want to take an early break or do you want to keep going? What do you think? I say we keep going.

We're only a few minutes in. Okay, well, let's talk about Willard Centerwall, then. Yeah, this is the guy that is initially responsible for this crossbreed, because in 1971, when he was a professor at Loma Linda University in California, he was working on trying to solve feline leukemia, and apparently that bingo cat is resistant

to feline leukemia. So he started working with hybridizing these cats to see what he could learn about this, scientifically speaking, to help save cats. Yeah, and we should say, I mean, there's a lot of people who are very not happy with the idea that people are hybridizing cats and creating designer cat breeds when there's tons of shelter cats that need to be adopted.

I'm welcome. Yeah. Willard Centrowall, though, he seems to have just, he did this innocently. Like, he wasn't trying to create a new designer breed of cat that he could sell. Right. He was doing it for scientific research. Enter another breeder, Jean Mill, who actually was a purposeful breeder of this new hybrid breed of cats, what became the Bengal cat. She collaborated with Centerwall and she was a conservationist. And that won't make any sense for a little while, but we'll, oh no, I'll bring it in now. The reason that she, a conservationist,

was involved in creating a hybridized cat was because she thought that if you got little cats out there that looked like leopards, it would make people more empathetic toward leopards in the wild, and hence would dry up the market for leopard skin coats and May even help conserve wild leopard populations because people Adopted like what looked like a little baby leopard at home. Yeah, and it is not lost on us that her last name was mill

Save your email And we'll mention one more guy before we break, a breeder named Bill Engler, who was a zookeeper and animal importer, worked a lot with exotic animals. And he had a leopard cat named Shaw in the early 70s, and he breeded them and created a bunch of bingo kittens. And I don't believe this, but people have surmised because his name was Bill Engler, that the name Be-Engle came from B. Engler, but I think it's clearly from that Asian leopard cat's name.

So much so that I don't know why people even came up with the other idea. Agreed. I think that's break time, huh? Yeah, let's do it. We'll be right back. ["The Last Supper"] So what happened at Chappaquiddick? Well, it really depends on who you talk to.

There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond. And left a woman behind to drown. There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News. It's, Teddy escapes, blonde drowns. And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you. The story really became about Ted's political future,

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American history is full of wise people. Well, women said something like, no, 99.99% of war is diarrhea and 1% is gory. Those founding fathers were gossipy AF and they loved to cut each other down. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions about American history and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer. Hamilton pauses and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar.

And Jefferson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said, it would have been harder to fake it than to do it. Listen to American History Hotline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, these cats, even though I'm completely against this kind of thing and selling pets like this for like two grand a pop, they're amazing looking.

They're incredible. They're gorgeous little tiny leopards. The rosettes can take various forms. They can be kind of pointy. They can kind of look like arrowheads. They can be more circular. They can look like paw prints. The marble-coated Bengal is one of the coolest-looking cats I've ever seen.

But again, I don't want to sound like I'm endorsing this kind of thing, you know? No, but I mean, like, these things do exist and they are beautiful to look at. And they do seem like pretty interesting cats as far as cats go, their personalities and what they demand from you. I was going to say require, but it seems like a demand. They're also different colored, they have different colored coats beneath their rosettes too, all the way up to white, which imitates snow leopards. So it looks like a mini baby snow leopard essentially running around your house.

They also have like brown, golden, charcoal gray, silverish, and all these different rosette combinations with different coat combinations means that there's an infinite variety of Bengal kittens just waiting to be bred. Yeah, they are muscular, they're very athletic. Apparently their hind legs are a little taller than the shoulders, so they look even a little different than your regular house cat. They weigh just sort of like the ones in the wild, 8 to 15 pounds, which is, can be small for a cat. And they're, like I said, they're very energetic. They like to take walks.

They don't lay around and sleep all day like other cats, apparently. They like to swim, which is very unique for cats, right? Yeah, they're into water-related activities, like swimming, showering with their owners. Water skiing? Yeah, I had wakeboarding, but yes, either one works. Oh no, I stepped on it.

That was even better. I stepped on it. That was even better. I stepped on yours too, so there you go. Although a kneeboarding cat, maybe that's the best joke. I thought a kneeboarding too. I workshopped it very briefly with myself and said, wakeboarding's the way to go. The thing is, is a lot of people buy these things, and they're like, oh, this is gonna go with my purse.

I'm gonna carry this cat around whenever I have my purse and then probably ignore it the rest of the time I have it. They're buying these cats for their looks, essentially, which is, I mean, kind of one of the things that they're bred for is their looks. The problem is, even if they're expecting, like, this is a cat I'm gonna take care of, most people are totally unprepared

for just how different Bengal cats are from your average cat. Like you said, all the stamina, all the... If they get bored, they're very aggressive, so you don't want them to get bored because just say bye-bye to your errands rent furniture. Right. Yeah. Like you're in for it if you buy a Bengal cat and take it as your own. It's just going to be way more work than the average cat, You're in for it if you buy a Bengal cat and take it as your own. It's just going to be way more work than the average cat, which can usually amuse itself.

So a lot of people buy two to keep them busy with one another. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess they have a lot of money because I saw that snow leopard version can go for like two grand. I am surprised that's all. Yeah. I guess so. I could see breeders charging way more than that. I'm surprised that's all. Yeah, I guess so.

I can see breeders charging way more than that. I'm really surprised. Yeah. That's a value. Well, apparently if they have wild parents or grandparents, it's even worse and they require even more socialization than, you know, which makes sense, than the ones who are further removed from that wild lineage.

And I looked up online because this article from How Stuff Works, I'm not sure when it was, but it said like Hawaii as a state has put a ban on breeding and ownership. And then, so I looked up and there are quite a few states that either have outright bans on ownerships or bans on breeding or both or if they don't have bans they have a lot of like you have to have a permit and like hoops you have to jump through to get one of these things. So yeah people are kind of standing up and or you know cat rescue organizations are obviously standing on their podium and screaming like please don't support this kind of thing do not buy hybrid cats.

Yeah if you ever drive past a strip mall and it says cats or puppies or something, kittens on a sign, you wanna keep driving. Oh, well, unless they're doing like an adoption event on the sidewalk. It's a little different. I'm talking more like a permanent sign that they create a sign that they're gonna put up

like on the shopping center's directory. Yeah, I just wanted to draw that distinction because that's what they will often do is set up in front of like Petco shopping center's directory. Yeah, I just wanted to draw that distinction because that's what they will often do is set up in front of like Petco or something. Yeah, you and I were looking once at a Petco before we got Mo and there were dogs, they had, it was so sad, they had dogs that had

all different kinds of special needs or handicaps kind of sequestered off from the other dogs. And among these dogs, there was a little Chihuahua, and apparently the only thing unusual about him was that he couldn't retract his tongue. So his tongue was always sticking out, and you had to keep his tongue moist. Yeah, it looked super cute.

Like it was, that's just always stuck with me. Yeah, I mean, there's a breed of dog that has that tongue out full-time, right? I don't know. I think that like the supposedly ugliest dog on earth, that breed, whatever it is, that is like patchy hair and looks kinda crazy, and has it, I think they have their tongue permanently out.

They have a non-retractable tongue? I guess so. We should do a short stuff on that dog, because I don't like calling an animal the ugliest, whatever. No, that sounds kind of internet click-baity, you know? Yeah, agreed. All right. Well, I think we're at the end of Bengal Cats, eh?

Yes. Okay. See you guys. Short stuff's out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.