Fluffy the Killer

The old joke goes: "Why are cats such assholes? Because they're God's perfect killing machines, but they're also tiny and adorable and humans keep scooping them up and talking baby talk to them."

At an adorable 3.5 pounds, the black-footed cat has the right to be among the crankiest of them all...

"Adorably big-eyed and smaller than a house cat, black-footed cats are far more successful at hunting than lions. They can jump up to five feet in the air and 6½ feet in distance; they kill eight to 14 meals per night and can eat 3,000 rodents a year.

“They’re considered the fierce cat,” said Bob Cisneros, Hogle Zoo’s associate director of animal care, who described kitten Gaia as a “mighty warrior.”

“These guys are voracious hunters,” he said."

That new resident at the Salt Lake City Zoo is pretty much fully grown at three pounds, which is about a fifth of the mass of Huck or Holden when they're in fighting trim. (Less than a fifth if we haven't been monitoring their dinner portions carefully.)

It looks like if I want to see black-footed cats, the closest ones are in Cleveland's Metroparks Zoo or the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.

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