I'd Name Him Redenbacher.

Click play and listen to this while you read.
It'll add to the experience. I promise.

So. Bearcats. What exactly is a bearcat? Well, if you look at the cat evolutionary tree I linked to yesterday, it would be somewhere near the bottom of the image with the linsang, the civets and the genets, so it is related to cats. It's in the Suborder of Carnivora called Feliformia, while means cat-like. It's not actually part of Family Felinae (it's from Family Viverridae), so it's not technically a cat, but it is catlike. It's also a burly omnivore, which is a pretty bear-like thing to be, hence the name bearcat. Its proper name is Binturong though. And it looks like this:

Anyone else think there's a bit of a resemblance
to Salacious B. Crumb?  No?  Just me?  Oh well.

It's around 60cm to 90cm long, with a tail around the same length, which means that a big specimen is probably longer tail-tip to nose than you are tall. It normally weighs between 10kg and 14kg, although it's not unheard of for large specimens to get into the 40kg range. It lives all throughout South-East Asia. The list of things that makes them fascinating is fairly long, and I don't want you cycling through Do The Bearcat too often, so I'll just give a quick lowdown for most.

They laugh.  Or at least, they make a chuckling sound when they're happy.  I'd love to throw a link here for you to listen to a chuckling bearcat, but I can't find one.  Hell, I even tracked down the episode of Dirty Jobs where they met a bearcat, and no chuckling there either. If Mike Rowe can't get footage of a happy bearcat, nobody can.

Their massive tail? It's prehensile. They are, in fact, one of only two 'carnivorous' animals with a prehensile tail, and arguably the largest animal on the planet with a prehensile tail. Carnivorous is in quotes there because even though they are capable of catching, killing and eating almost anything smaller than they are, they eat mostly fruit.

They are capable of embryonic diapause, which means they're capable of delaying fetal development for up to a year after becoming pregnant. This lets them time the birth of their litter (up to six) to a time when things are looking good, whether that's Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter. There's only around 100 species of mammals that can do it, and the bearcat's one of them.

They are capable of turning their ankles backwards so that their claws can still grip into trees as they climb down face-first.

Lastly, and bestly in my opinion, is their musk glands. When you hear musk, it's not generally a good thing. Think sweat, think cat piss, think skunks. None of those are particularly pleasant. And then along comes the binturong and its musk glands. What does binturong musk smell like? Buttered popcorn. Or cornbread, depending on who you ask. Either way, it smalls buttery and delicious. Their largely fruit-based diet, along with their buttery-corn musk, makes their poop smell (according to some, not according to Mike Rowe) like Frito corn chips.

While I'm fairly certain that it's not legal to own one as a pet anywhere in North America, they are sometimes kept as pets in Malaysia. Which means they can be at least partly domesticated.  Which means I want myself a biggish, burly, buttery beast for myself.

The binturong: Cat-like, bear-like, and deliciously buttery scented.

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Sources:
Binturong image taken from the East Timor National Zoo
Wikipedia
San Diego zoo
Honolulu zoo
TheAnimalFiles.com
Various YouTube videos linked above