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Julie Burris paid $1,800 for a nine-week-old black leopard. She thought it was cute and friendly until the day it attacked her and ripped her head open. (Warning: the video above has graphic images of her stitched-together head around the 1:40 mark.) Burris’s story, which she recently told to CNN, isn’t unique.

A domestic cat makes a great pet. A tiger does not. (tiger courtesy of flickr user skipnclick)

There was the 10-year-old girl last year who was attacked by a pet mountain lion. The chimpanzee in Connecticut that mauled his owner’s friend, leaving her severely disfigured. The Harlem man whose tiger and alligator were discovered in his apartment in 2003 after he went to the hospital for a “pit bull” bite. They’re all lucky to be alive, though. A Pennsylvania woman died last year after being attacked by her “pet,” a 350-pound black bear she raised from a cub.

In most U.S. states, private ownership of large exotic animals, such as big cats and primates, is not illegal. But unlike with domesticated cats and dogs, putting a wild animal in a home, even raising it by hand from a newborn, does not make it a pet. They are still wild animals, as the stories above tell.

Domestication is a process that occurs over many generations of animals. Over time—a lot of time in most cases—undesirable traits are bred out of a species. Even then, those animals often retain the ability to maim and kill. Four and half million people are bitten by dogs each year in the United States. And my cat frequently reminds me that she is not fully domesticated, despite a 10,000-year history of cats living with humans; I can show you the scars.

Animal behaviorist Louis Dorfman writes:

An exotic cat is an evolutionary marvel of reactions and instincts, together with a strong will. They can never be tamed in the sense we normally associate with that word. They are strongly affected by any source of stimulation, and it affects their mood and reactions. The degree of their reactions to any stimulus is also much greater than the response we would consider appropriate by our standards. These factors are crucial to understanding what must be known in order to safely be in contact with these beings on a regular basis. If one attempts to control the cat’s actions, and the cat considers you a source of agitation at a time when it is already excited, nervous or already agitated, the cat may well attack or strike out at you. The fact that you raised it will not matter. Sound like it can be domesticated?

Similar things can be said about any large exotic animal. Bears, chimpanzees, lions, leopards: When they get big enough to kill you, they can kill you. That instinct never goes away.

But even if that danger is not enough to convince people to pass over these animals, there is the difficulty of caring for such a large animal. The tiger in Harlem was confined to an apartment; the neighbor below complained of urine leaking into her home. There’s the story of Lucy, a chimpanzee raised by humans and taught sign language; she grew uncontrollable that her “parents” thought it best she be released to the wild, where she was likely killed by poachers. These animals require plenty of space and food and medical care; what makes anyone think they’d make good pets?

Humpback whales (courtesy of NOAA)

Living organisms are a great place to store carbon. Trees are the most common organisms to be used as carbon sinks, but other things might be even better. Whales are particularly good for this because they are large—blue whales are the largest animals on Earth—and when they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean taking the carbon with them and keeping it out of the atmosphere where it would contribute to climate change.

Killing those whales, though, prevents all that carbon from being stored at the bottom of the ocean, whether the whale is turned into lamp oil, as it was a hundred years ago, or consumed as dinner, like in Japan today.

University of Maine marine scientist Andrew Pershing calculated that about 110 million tons of carbon has been released from the past 100 years of whaling (not counting the emissions from the boats used to hunt the whales). And while there are far bigger sources of carbon, such as our cars, whaling has released about as much carbon as deforesting much of New England would.

There has been some discussion lately of discontinuing the ban on commercial whaling (a ban that Japan, Iceland and Norway already ignore). The value of whales as a carbon sink, though, is a new enough idea that it hasn’t yet made it into those talks. But Pershing suggested at a recent scientific meeting that a system of carbon credits could be developed to raise funds to protect whales and other large oceanic predators. As he explained to BBC News, “These are huge and they are top predators, so unless they’re fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die].”

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An Egyptian fruit bat aims for an apple (image courtesy of Yossi Yovel)

The Egyptian fruit bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus) pinpoints its meal with its sonar not by aiming in front but by “looking” off from side to side, according to a study in a recent issue of Science.

With sonar, a bat (or whale or submarine) will emit a sound that is reflected off nearby objects. Those sound waves are altered by the objects, and the bat can use those changes to gain information about what the object is and its distance and direction. There are two strategies for sonar detection: A sonar beam that is sent directly forward, which returns more information overall, or a signal that hits objects on an angle, which can give more precise information.

Mathematically, strategy number two is the best strategy, and that is the one that Egyptian fruit bats use. The researchers suggest that such a strategy tradeoff may be involved in other detection methods, such as smelling, vision and hearing.

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Like humans, bonobos will share (courtesy of flickr user tim ellis)

Sharing may seem like a small thing—we do it all the time. There’s the neighbor who bakes you cookies or the co-worker who makes an extra cup of coffee for you. But sharing has been thought to be a uniquely human trait, not to be found in the animal world. For example, chimpanzees, our closest relative, won’t share food. But what about bonobos, the chimp’s more peaceful cousin?

Brian Hare, from Duke University, and Suzy Kwetuenda of Lola ya Bonobo, a bonobo sanctuary in Congo, conducted a small experiment with multiple pairs of bonobos living at the sanctuary. They placed one bonobo in a room with some food. That bonobo could then choose to eat all of the food itself or let in the other bonobo from an adjacent room and share the bounty (see video below).

More often than not, the bonobos chose to share their food. “Subjects preferred to voluntarily open the recipient’s door to allow them to share highly desirable food that they could have easily eaten alone–with no signs of agression, frustration or change in the speed or rate of sharing across trials,” the researchers write in an article that will appear in the March 8 issue of Current Biology.

The animals weren’t sharing because of kinship—the bonobos weren’t related—or to pay off past debts, since even bonobos that were complete strangers shared. Hare and Kwetuenda suggest that the bonobos were sharing “in an attempt to receive favors in the future from the recipients or due to a more altruistic motivation,” much the same reasons that humans will share.

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Cute kitty (courtesy of flickr user skipnclick)

The Lunar New Year was on Sunday, welcoming in the year of the Tiger. The World Wildlife Fund has taken that as a sign to launch their own tiger campaign “Tx2: Double or Nothing” with the aim of doubling the wild tiger population by 2022, the next year of the Tiger.

Like many large predator species around the world, the tiger (Panthera tigris) isn’t doing very well. There are only around 3,200 left in the wild in Asia. In the past 70 years, three subspecies of tiger have gone extinct and a fourth hasn’t been seen in wild for the past 25 years. WWF notes a list of threats that includes: paper, palm oil and rubber plantations that are replacing forests in Indonesia and Malaysia; dams along the Mekong River that fragment tiger habitat; trafficking in tiger bones, skins and meat; and climate change.

WWF has the support of the 13 nations where tigers still roam, but it remains to be seen if their campaign will see any success. With the human population growing, will there still be room for these cute but deadly kitties? Or will they become the second mythical creature–after the dragon–on the lunar calendar?