Yes, a lion-sized housecat would need thicker and more sturdily built legs in order to walk. But lions are muscled well beyond what they need to walk. They are built to be able to take down a zebra. Domestic cats can tackle animals up to around rabbit size but that doesn’t take as much relative power as a lion’s prey.
Anyway, compare a lion’s skull to a house cat skull to see the difference. That’s more than the square-cube law can account for.
Perhaps so, but it’s probably also worth considering that a lion-sized housecat would probably need to hunt bigger prey than mice and rabbits, but I expect that’s really beyond the reasonable scope of this thread’s question.
A cat-sized lion wouldn’t be particularly dangerous, but it would be adorable.
Probably quite dangerous for the neighbourhood dogs which would be brought to me as presents.
Can we choose which breed we are starting with? Ragdolls are apparently one of the most docile cat breeds and you gotta admit a lion sized rag doll would be pretty damn irresistible.
The novels of sf writer Cordwainer Smith, especially the Instrumentality of Man series, depict a world in which evolved felines and other animals, the Underpeople, coexist with mankind.
We’re talking about a hypothetical animal scaled up from a housecat, not a totally redesigned one.
Agreed - got to draw the line somewhere.
Going to the other extreme then (just for fun) - if we just geometrically scale up the housecat without redesigning it at all, we actually get something that is probably rather feeble and fragile - and probably can’t do us a lot of damage.
What about a lion-sized munchkin cat?
