Shadowing Practice: ALL THE CATS, EXPLAINED - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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When we made our video about the canine family tree, and the accompanying doggone gorgeous poster, you all liked it a lot.
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But one comment kept coming up over and over and over again.
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When are we going to make a feline one?
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Well, your wish is our command.
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Because unlike cats, we actually respond to commands.
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Hi, I'm David, and this is Feline Earth.
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This is a feline.
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And so is this.
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And so is this.
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And so are all of these kitties.
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Wild felines come in all shapes and sizes and live all over the world.
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Plus, there are more than half a billion domestic cats!
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In this video, I'm going to take you on a tour of the amazing feline family, both wild and domestic, and show off the poster we made to celebrate them.
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Okay, let's start off with a few of our favorite extinct kitties.
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The largest cat to ever exist was likely Smilodon populator, a saber-toothed tiger who weighed roughly half a ton and had canine teeth up to 11 inches long.
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Its massive teeth allowed it to take down big prey including bison and giant ground sloths, likely with just one bite to the throat.
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One of my favorite extinct velines is the American cheetah, which used to live all over the US until it died out soon after humans arrived.
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It wasn't closely related to the modern cheetah, and it was a lot bigger, but it was probably almost as fast, which helps explain why its favorite meal,
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the pronghorn, is still the second fastest mammal in the world today.
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Let's go back a little farther in time, 30 million years ago, to meet Proailorus.
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It looked kind of like a mongoose and likely lived up in the trees, hunting birds and rodents across most of Eurasia.
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it was the very first feline, which means that it was the grand catty of all modern kitties.
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So let's get into the modern cats.
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Let's start with the largest living cats over here on the Panthera branch.
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A few lions still live in a small part of India, but most lions roam the savannas of Africa.
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Lions live in social groups known as prides, where the bigger males patrol the territory and fight off rivals, while the smaller, sleeker females take care of the hunting and the cub care.
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And as Kate wants me to point out, lions can be even bigger scavengers than hyenas.
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In some places, they actually steal more food than they hunt.
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Tigers, on the other hand, mostly live in the forests of Asia, and they're usually solitary.
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They tend to be ambush hunters, using their stripey camouflage to blend into the grass before launching an attack on an unsuspecting ungulate.
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And lions and tigers can get together.
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Since felines tend to be much more genetically similar than other mammal families, that means that they can make hybrid babies together easier than other animals can.
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Perhaps the most famous example is the liger, the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger, which pretty much only happens in captivity.
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Ligers are huge, as big as the ancient Smilodons, likely because the genes that limit growth in lions tend to come from the females.
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Tigons, which are the offspring of a female lion and a male tiger, look similar, but because of those genes, they're way smaller.
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Alright, let's build out this panthera branch a little bit more.
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Jaguars and leopards are confusingly similar.
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Here's how to tell them apart.
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Jaguars live in the Americas, while leopards live in Africa and Asia.
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And while jaguars have fur patterns known as rosettes that are large and have a central spot, leopard rosettes are smaller and don't have a spot in the middle.
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Also while any member of the panthera branch with a black coat could be called a black panther,
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jaguars and leopards are the only species of big cats that regularly produce individuals with extra melanin.
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Confusingly, snow leopards aren't actually that closely related to leopards.
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They're more closely related to tigers.
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These rare cats do live in the snow, though, up in the Himalayas, where their bushy coats and thick tail full of insulating fat help them survive the cold.
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Oh, wait, there's also the clouded leopard, which split off from the rest of the Panthera branch a long time ago, so it's not that closely related to either the leopard or the snow leopard.
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This slightly smaller kitty, which also lives in Asia, is the best tree climber of all the big cats.
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Okay, let's head over to the branch that's more closely related to modern cats, the Fellini branch.
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Let's start with the bay cat, one of the rarest cats in the world.
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This small kitty only lives on the island of Borneo, and so few have been observed in the wild that we're not even sure what they eat.
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The marbled cat lives in Asia and looks like a mini-clouded leopard, except that it has an extra-long tail that helps it balance as it climbs through the trees.
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The serval has the longest legs of any cat relative to its body size, and it uses them to pounce on mice in the African savanna.
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The caracal, which lives across Africa and parts of Asia, is easily recognizable thanks through the long hairs on the top of its ears.
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The tufts likely act as acoustic amplifiers, allowing the cat to hear small prey like birds nearby.
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The Cod Cod is so small, it looks like a jaguar kitten.
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It prowls around the forests of Chile looking for its favorite food, a little bird known as the Wet Wet.
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The Oncilla is another itty bitty South American cat.
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It uses its spots as camouflage while it hunts little prey like lizards.
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About 20% of Oncillas though are totally black.
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That's likely because Oncillas do most of their hunting at night, so the darker color also works well as camouflage.
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The margay is a small cat that lives in Mexico and Central and South America.
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When the margay is hunting its favorite food, the tiny monkey known as the tamarin, it sometimes mimics the monkey's call to draw its prey closer before it pounces.
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There are a lot of ocelots down in the Amazon, and one of their go-to meals is mice.
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Ecologists think that their rodent-heavy diet actually helps the forest grow, as many of their victims leave stashes of buried seeds behind that, instead of getting eaten, germinate into new plants.
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The bobcats of North America are called bobcats because it looks like their tail was cut off, or bobbed, but no one really seems to know why that is.
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It's possible that there's no real evolutionary reason.
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Perhaps some mutation caused them to grow a short tail, and it didn't help or hurt, so it just sorta stuck around.
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Lynx are closely related to bobcats and share the same tiny tails.
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They also have cool facial roughs that look like horseshoe mustaches.
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The larger Eurasian lynxes love to eat roe deer.
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On average, each lynx takes down more than 60 deer every year.
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Okay, let's take a look at another bough of this branch of the feline tree.
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The cheetah, which lives across Africa and parts of Asia, can run faster than any other land animal because every part of a cheetah is optimized for speed.
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They have a flexible spine that acts like a coiled spring, a small aerodynamic head, enlarged lungs, and a tail that acts like a rudder when they turn at high speed.
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The puma is another record setter.
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It can leap distances of almost 40 feet, making it the best jumper in the animal kingdom.
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Pumas live all over the Americas, and different people in different places call them everything from cougars to mountain lions to catamounts to panthers.
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The puma's closest relative is the jaguarundi of Central and South America, which is sometimes called an otter cat.
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That's because the jaguarundi not only looks like an otter, it also tends to live close to rivers and will even jump in and catch fish.
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Okay, let's check out the final part of the tree, the wild cats most closely related to our furry pets.
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The leopard cat looks like, well, like a tiny leopard.
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And while leopard cats are not the ancestors of modern domestic cats, there's evidence that long ago in China, some of them were kept as pets.
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This is a Pallas' cat.
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Its dense gray fur and low round ears make it look sort of like a grumpy smurf, but it's perfectly adapted to the cold plateaus of Mongolia and Tibet where it lives.
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In fact, when there's lots of snow around, it often sits with its paws on its tail to to keep its little toesies warm.
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The tiny sand cat has large ears relative to its size, allowing it to hear prey scurrying around in the North African desert from as far as half a kilometer away.
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Then there are the cats that are just called wild cats.
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The African and European species of wild cats are slightly larger than most modern domestic cats, but otherwise they look very similar.
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And that's no coincidence, since domestic cats are directly descended from wild cats.
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In fact, wild cats probably started habituating themselves to people around 10,000 years ago, around when humans first invented agriculture.
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Once we started storing things like grain, rodents moved in, and the wild cats likely followed soon after.
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Over the millennia, domestic cats started to differ from their wild cat ancestors.
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While wild cats almost exclusively eat meat, domestic cats are able to better digest plant matter in order to feed off of our scraps, and they become a little less skittish.
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One of the first places that we fell in love with our new feline companions was ancient Egypt.
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Egyptians literally worshipped cats, and the modern breed, known as the Egyptian Mao, is likely descended from those cats.
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Remember how I mentioned earlier that cat species can make hybrid babies more easily than other animals can?
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Well, the bangle cat is the hybrid of a domestic cat, usually an Egyptian Mao, and a leopard cat.
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It's the only pet cat that has rosette markings.
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And even though most bangles are now the product of several generations of domestication, they're still illegal to own in some areas.
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Speaking of hybrids, there's also the Savannah Cat, which is part serval and part domestic cat.
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Okay, let's get into some of the other domestic cat breeds.
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Ragdoll cats are known for their large size, long hair, blue eyes, and tendency to go limp when they get picked up.
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Ragdolls are sometimes called puppy cats since they are super affectionate and quickly pick up tricks like retrieving.
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Maine Coons are the most popular cat breed, and the longest one.
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The longest domestic cat ever measured was a Maine Coon named Stewie, who stretched out to more than four feet from nose to tail.
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In addition to their size, Maine Coons also often exhibit polydactylism, that is, extra toes, since the gene associated with it is common among their breed.
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Scottish Folds are instantly recognizable thanks to the very cute way their ears bend down over their heads.
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Two of Taylor Swift's cats are Scottish Folds.
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Unfortunately, that fold is due to a genetic condition that causes cartilage to grow abnormally, and that means that pretty much all Scottish Folds also develop arthritis.
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The American Shorthair is the descendant of working cats that came over to the US from Europe on ships, including the Mayflower, and were tasked with protecting the cargo from mice and rats.
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The British Shorthair is the most popular cat breed in England, and it's a relatively chonky boy.
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It's got a thick build and a wide face that makes it look super content.
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No wonder it was the inspiration for the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
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Siamese cats have a triangular face, long ears, and an elongated slender body.
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Their distinct color pattern is due to the fact that all Siamese cats are sort of temperature-controlled albinos.
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The warmer parts of the cat end up as white, while the cooler parts are pigmented.
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Persian cats are easy to identify due to their long hair, short legs, and extremely flat faces.
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In the movie Austin Powers, Dr. Evil's cat, Mr. Bigglesworth, was originally played by a Persian cat.
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But when Mr. Bigglesworth comes back from being cryogenically frozen, he's bald.
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They didn't shave the Persian though.
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Instead, they swapped it out for a Sphinx cat, which is naturally hairless due to a genetic mutation.
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Turkish Angoras look very similar to Persian cats, except that their faces are not nearly as flat.
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Angoras are more likely than other cats to be heterochromatic, meaning that they have different colored eyes.
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The Devon Rex is a small kitty with a short curly coat and wide set ears, which to me makes it look like a mischievous kitty from a fairy tale.
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It kind of looks like the sort of cat a pixie would have.
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The long and lean Abyssinians look pretty regal with their beautiful coats, But they're known as the jokesters of the cat world due to their playfulness and actual interest in human company.
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Norwegian forest cats have long fur and dense water-resistant undercoats that keep them warm as they play in the snow.
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Despite their bulk, these cats are great climbers.
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But the vast majority of cats out there aren't purebred.
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They're the feline equivalent of mutts.
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You might have heard these cats referred to as domestic shorthairs or longhairs, unless you're British.
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If so, you probably call them moggies.
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And since there's no real selection in these cats for specific appearance genes, These kitties come in all sorts of colors and patterns.
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Let's go through a few of them.
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A tabby is any mixed breed with a striped pattern on its coat.
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Approximately 80% of domestic cats are tabbies.
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It turns out that the stripy genes cats inherited from their feline ancestors are pretty strong.
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That said, there are lots of other color patterns too, including solid color cats, which are usually black.
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Black cats are often associated with bad luck and witchcraft, mostly thanks to religious texts from the Middle Ages that associated them with the devil.
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All calico cats are female because that orange, white, and black pattern is linked to the X chromosome.
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The name comes from the Indian city of Calicut, which is famous for its colorful printed fabrics.
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Tortoise shell cats are also female, again because the genes that control the orange and black pattern are on the X chromosome.
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But unlike calicos, they are way less white and the colors tend to be more blended, like those on a tortoise's shell.
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Bi-colored cats have just two colors, often black and white.
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Occasionally this pattern forms so that the kitty looks like it's wearing socks or a dress shirt.
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In fact, the tuxedo version of the bicolored cat is the basis for Mr. Misopheles, the magical cat in the musical Cats.
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The feline family makes for an amazing catalog of cats.
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We love our cats here at MinuteEarth and we loved making this video.
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And if this video was the perfect catnip for you or someone you like, you'll be psyched to learn that you can buy this awesome poster from our DFTBA shop.
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It will look great on your wall or your classroom
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and it's also the perfect gift for any cat lover in your life.
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Just go to dftba.com slash MinuteEarth right meow.
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And if you buy both our canine and feline poster together, you'll get 15% off.
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Thank you and thanks for supporting MinuteEarth.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “ALL THE CATS, EXPLAINED”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: cat, leopard, feline, domestic, wild. This video has 154 sentences and 2642 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:30. The speaker talks fast, about 211 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 76% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| leopard noun | /ˈlɛp.ɚd/ | A large wild cat with a spotted coat native to Africa and Asia (Panthera pardus). |
| feline adjective | /ˈfiːlaɪn/ | Of or pertaining to cats. |
| kitty noun | /ˈkɪti/ | A young cat; a kitten. |
| breed verb | /ˈbɹiːd/ | To give birth to; to be the native place of. |
| jaguar noun | /ˈd͡ʒæɡ.wɑɹ/ | A carnivorous spotted large cat native to South and Central America, Panthera onca. |
| prey noun | /pɹeɪ/ | That which is or may be seized by animals to be devoured. |
| cheetah noun | /ˈt͡ʃiːtə/ | A distinctive member (Acinonyx jubatus) of the cat family, slightly smaller than the leopard, but with proportionately longer limbs and a smaller head; native… |
| poster noun | /ˈpoʊstɚ/ | A picture of a celebrity, an event etc., intended to be attached to a wall. |
| ancestor noun | /ˈæn.sɛs.tɚ/ | One from whom a person is descended, whether on the father's or mother's side, at any distance of time; a progenitor; a forefather; a forebear. |
| bobcat noun | /ˈbɔb.kæt/ | A North American wildcat (Lynx rufus), having tufted ears and a short tail. |
| camouflage noun | /ˈkæ.məˌflɑːʒ/ | A disguise or covering up. |
| canine adjective | /ˈkeɪˌnaɪn/ | Of, or pertaining to, a dog or dogs. |
| hybrid noun | /ˈhaɪ.bɹɪd/ | Offspring resulting from cross-breeding different entities, e.g. two different species or two purebred parent strains. |
| bangle noun | /ˈbæŋ.ɡəl/ | A rigid bracelet or anklet, especially one with no clasp. |
| calico noun | /ˈkæ.lɪ.koʊ/ | A kind of rough cloth made from unbleached and not fully processed cotton, often printed with a bright pattern. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. | |
| take down verb | To remove something from a wall or similar vertical surface to which it is fixed. | |
| build out verb | To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.). | |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| come back from verb | To become successful, confident or effective again after an injury, setback, failure, embarrassment, etc. | |
| cut off verb | /ˌkʌt ˈɔf/ [ˌkɐɾ ˈɔf] | To remove by cutting. |
| die out verb | To become extinct. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | could be called · have been observed · are called |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | feline, which means · Tigons, which are · America, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 19 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, aren't, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: panther /ˈpænθəɹ/, arthritis /ɑːˈθɹ(a)ɪtɪs/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: camouflage /ˈkæ.məˌflɑːʒ/, mutation /mjuˈteɪʃən/, affectionate /əˈfɛkʃənət/, ambush /ˈæm.bʊʃ/, evolutionary /ˌiː.vəˈluː.ʃən.ɛɹ.i/
- Long words — get the stress right: abnormally /æbˈnɔɹ.mə.li/, aerodynamic /ˌɛəɹəʊdaɪˈnæmɪk/, affectionate /əˈfɛkʃənət/, amplifier /ˈæm.plə.faɪ.ə/, captivity /kæpˈtɪvɪti/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like leopard, feline, kitty.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.