How come u can cross breed dogs and cats but not big cats or birds?

Question

or fish and other animals?

Answer 1

You are not creating hybrids when you cross breed dogs and cats.  They are all the same species.  You can cross many similar species, but the hybrid creation is usually sterile (unable to breed).  

Lions & tigers = Ligers or Tigons

zebras can be crossed with horses or donkeys

grey squirrels interbreed with black and red

bird species can interbreed as well.  

falconers have interbred gyrfalcons and peregrines for centuries

crane species can also interbreed, sandhill /whooping crane hybrids are not unheard of.

It just depends on how similar the DNA is.  If it's close enough, it's possible.

By the way, I have SEEN up close and personal all the above crosses.  They exist and are not figments of my (or anyone elses) imagination.

Answer 2

You can cross breed big cats, but i am not sure about birds, but an example of a cross bred big cat is the liger, a cross between a lion and a tiger.

Answer 3

There is only one species of domestic dog and one of domestic cats. Each group is interfertile. It is a bit tougher to do but there are inter-species crosses, such as ligers and tigons and mules. Among fishes, there are even inter-generic crosses that are fertile with each other and with both parent species.

Answer 4

All domestic dogs are the same species, regardless of what breed they are. For example, a Rottweiler, a Chihuahua and a Poodle are all still dogs. The same is true of domestic cats - a Siamese, a Persian and an Abyssinian are all still cats. So if you breed these animals with one another, you are not producing hybrids of different animals - you're just producing crossbreeds (often called mongrels or mutts in dogs, and moggies in cats) of the same species.

Breeding two different species together is a different matter. In order for two different species to interbreed, they must be closely related - usually within the same genus, and at least within the same family. Even then, the offspring are usually sterile. The most famous example is the mule - a cross between a male donkey and female horse (a cross between a male horse and female donkey is called a hinny). Donkeys and horses both belong to the family Equidae and the genus Equus, which enables them to interbreed, but the offspring are nearly always sterile because the parents have different numbers of chromosomes. You certainly can breed certain species of big cats with each other - ligers (offspring of a male lion and female tiger) and tigons (offspring of a male tiger and female lion) are probably the best-known. You can also have, for example, a leopon (leopard-lion hybrid) and a jagulep (jaguar-leopard hybrid). The same is true for birds, fish and other animals - if two species are related closely enough, they can interbreed.