Cats Lovers: Mating and Motherhood . . . and “Fixing”

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Sterile tom, false pregnancy

One curiosity about neutered tomcats is that some of them still seek out a female in heat and go through the motions of mating, even though ...

queen (who is in heat, naturally) is delivered in a carrier to a special queen pen in the stud house. This separates her, via wire or bars,...

During mating, the tomcat always sinks his canine teeth—the fangs—into the neck skin of the female. This isn’t optional, and if for some rea...

Cats, like most animals, have sex strictly for reproduction, and so it only takes place when the female is fully fertile. Part of the brief ...

maintain for up to three minutes without stopping. Bothersome as it is to us, it serves the obvious purpose of letting the tomcats know s...

Tomcats have a reputation for being promiscuous, but in fact an adult tom, unneutered, never has sex on his mind (unlike male humans). His e...

A male cat who has never been neutered is called “whole.” While we might debate the subject of whether an adult male human can be happy and ...

A female pet is spayed, which means her ovaries and uterus are removed. (Interestingly, it comes from the old French word espeer, meaning “t...

kittens in the same litter can have different fathers). But it does strike some people as odd that kittens, once grown and separated from t...

kittens are about ﬁfty days old, a mother seems to realize they are ready for the world. Her work is done, and there is no anxiety about ...

English word “litter” is rooted in the old French word, and it has two related meanings that apply to cats. A “litter” of kittens reﬂects t...

person who grew up in large family generally may have better social skills than someone from a small family. This is, in a way, true for ca...

Both male and female kittens will happily chase after rolling objects, just as they will swat at suspended objects like strings and strips o...

mothers . So how old is a cat when he can do his own killing? Roughly two months, by which time most kittens can catch and kill a mouse. Her...

Roughly about the time of weaning (three weeks or so), kittens ﬁnd a new source of pleasure besides nursing, namely play. It begins with gen...

kitten is weaned, his sucking days are over—but not always. Sometimes older kittens, and even adult cats, can be seen sucking on another ca...

food . Around the third or fourth week after birth, the mother actually starts to move away from the kittens when they try to nurse. There...

As noted, kittens are born both blind and deaf. So which comes ﬁrst, hearing or seeing? The average kitten’s eyes open in about a week—the r...

A kitten has its own instinctive response to “scruffing”: while being carried by its scruff, it stops wriggling and tucks its legs close to ...

We’ve all seen it, and yes, it is adorable: a mother cat transporting a kitten by carrying it by the scruff of the neck. A cat’s skin is fai...