July 12, 2025

The Palawan Bearcat

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a bearcat. It looked like a big black Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland with large glossy eyes, a long prehensile tail, gray whiskers, and a buttered-popcorn smell. They are a popular zoo animal, found in zoos in the US and Europe. The one I saw was in a zoo in Ilocos Sur a few years ago. It wasn’t until later that I began to learn more about them.

A Palawan Bearcat in captivity, in Ilocos Sur.

Bearcats, also known as Binturong (Arctictis binturong whitei), can be found throughout Southeast Asia. In the Philippines though they only exist in Palawan. This is because they originated from mainland Southeast Asia, and somehow found their way to Palawan via Cebu Pacific or Air Asia promos. Ok just kidding, scientists believe they made the trip during the ice age, when land bridges linked islands in Indonesia, Malaysia, Borneo, and Palawan. The ice age is named after a moment in time (about 11,700 years ago) when much of the oceans were held in ice in the north and south poles. Thus lowering sea levels, and revealing more land for land-loving lifeforms to cross.

Palawan bearcats smell like popcorn to mark territory or find mates thanks to a mix of their urine and sweat. Sexy!

As for that popcorn smell, one study says it comes from a mix of binturong urine and binturong sweat, which doesn’t make it as appetizing as actual popcorn. A compound called 2-P can be found in binturong pee, the same compound found in cooked popcorn. Like other animals, they use urine to mark territory or to find mates. Biologists are still trying to figure out how binturong develop the 2P compound without making any popcorn. This is because the compound is only known from cooking things, and not from nature.

Anyway, binturong is just one of many awesome species in the Philippines with whom we share natural resources with. They love the trees, which makes them “arboreal”, and thanks to them they help grow more and more forests because they eat lots of figs. They then poop these figs as they travel through the forest canopy, planting more seeds for the forest. Also, they’re neither bears or cats, they’re actually more closely related to civets.

If you ever find yourself in a forest in Palawan, Vietnam, or Thailand and smell popcorn, no that isn’t a movie theater nearby. It’s your neighborhood friendly binturong peeing on trees above you, looking for love.