Caracal

A caracal recently caught on camera killing twenty African penguins near Cape Town was probably hoping the blame would be pinned on a lynx.

The two look alike, at least at a glance, in dim light, with clouds across the moon. Local law enforcement could be faced with a genuine conundrum if not for the fact that the nearest lynx lives in Spain.

Despite their similarity in size, and the natty tufts of hair on their ears, the two cats are only distantly related. The caracal has been around a long time, eight million years or more, whilst the lynx is a much newer evolutionary addition to the feline family. The caracal’s closest cousin isn’t the lynx, but rather the African Golden Cat, which will no doubt also claim to have been nowhere near the penguin colony at the time.

Nevertheless, as far as nomenclature is concerned, confusion reigns and has for as long as anyone can’t remember. Caracals owe their name to the kind of sloppy pronunciation which happens when cultures collide and coalesce. The Turks called the cat “kara kulak”, which means “black ear”, and the word bumbled into English as “caracal”. Prior to that, in the Middle Ages, everyone thought they were lynxes, because that’s what the Romans and the brainy Ancient Greeks had called them; in fact any cat bigger than the humble domestic pussy, and smaller than a lion or a leopard, was often called a lynx.

Reluctant to let go of a punchy name, many folk in South Africa still call the caracal a lynx, while a select few elevate the cats to a higher social strata, and call it a caracal-lynx. The Afrikaners, refusing to get embroiled in the controversy, call it a rooikat.