text: why do big cats have cubs, but small cats have kittens?&#92;?   because big cats have pride. (gnuck, gnuck.)  and it would really hurt if you were a little house cat and had to give birth to a lion. ouch!  it's just a matter of language. english has all kinds of unusual terms for groups of animals, & there's not any logic to it. one way you could think of it is that the name for the group isn't organized around taxonomy (the scientific categorization of species). we'd say a "flock of seagulls" or a "flock of sheep," but a group of crows is, believe it or not, a "murder of crows."  the same kind of thing with what we call young animals. goats have kids & people have kids. your example is just one that works the opposite way, when like things are differentiated rather than clumped together.