Earth’s Greatest Cats
This year’s Big Cat Week on Nat Geo WILD includes the remarkable movie The Last Lions.
Beginning Sunday, December 11th, it’s six six days of cougars, leopards, cheetahs, tigers and their various cousins.
If I had to choose a personal favorite, I guess it would be the jaguars you’ll see on Monday in Hunt for the Shadow Cat. For the ancient Mayans, the Jaguar god Huracan (from which we get the word “hurricane”) was the dark force of night and chaos, brother of the serpent god of light Kukulcan. To this day, the jaguars are still the most mysterious and least understood of all big cats. In this episode, we meet some of the team of Panthera, a charity that’s dedicated to saving the jaguars from the continuing demolition of their forest homes in Central America.
The week rounds out with The Last of the Lions which won top prizes last year at the Jackson Hole Film Festival. It tells the story of a mother lion who will do anything, and risk everything, to protect her family from the old threats of other animals and the new threats of the world’s most dangerous animal: humans. It’s a wildlife movie worth watching.
The whole series is tied to National Geographic’s Big Cat Initiative, which is working to halt the decline of these iconic animals. And with the lion population alone having collapsed more than 90 percent in the last 50 years, few initiatives can be more urgent.
An episode guide is on the Nat Geo WILD website.