A six-month-old cat, Milo, wakes up at home from a neutering operation and appears to show his dissatisfaction with what has happened when he lets out a huge screech. He then spends about an hour checking what he’s missing! His owner photographed in but sadly there isn’t a video.
There is a serious side to this amusing story, dare I mention it. It makes me wonder whether, sometimes, male cats do recognise the fact that they have lost their balls after the operation! We know they recover extremely quickly from the operation and can go home on the same day. Afterwards they behave normally as if nothing had happened. But are we reading this correctly? Are we sure that they believe nothing has happened? We don’t know how they feel emotionally. We tend to underplay the operation, minimise its impact, as a way of making it more acceptable. But procreating is a major part of a male cat’s life; that and hunting.
Perhaps male cats do feel a sense of loss and perhaps they do recognise that a part of their anatomy – a very important part of their anatomy – is missing. It that a crazy idea?
John Reed, 58, a property developer and Milo’s caretaker with his wife, Julia, said:
“It was priceless. He took about a good hour or so coming around. He looked down and realised they were missing and let out this almighty screech. He carried on looking down and staring for ages. I just chuckled. We’ve had a good laugh at the pictures since. The second one is amazing.”
I am not sure that I would have laughed. I tend to feel sorry for male cats who have to have their testicles removed to stop them procreating. But that’s just me. I’m not your mainstream cat caretaker. I prefer to leave what nature gave us alone if at all possible but I understand that it is not possible with respect to a male, domestic cat’s balls!
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I have never seen that before. Most of my cats have been male and I have never seen that reaction before. Even the first male who was over 12 months and was very interested in the female next door didn’t give a hoot. I wonder if personality plays a part? If I had not read of others, I might have written it off as a hoax.
Cat Lady: I’ve also never seen this response from any male cats I’ve had neutered.
I can’t help feeling there’s a certain amount of anthropomorphism involved when it comes to neutering male cats. You never hear anyone making similar observations about neutered females or even cats who had limbs amputated.
That poor baby! My boy Bandit did the exact same thing, but without the screaming. The day after I brought Bandit home, he was groggy but he recovered, and for a week he didn’t appear to notice something of his was missing.
I adopted him back in the day before shelters neutered young kittens, so for the operation I took him back. He was an absolute terror. Once he somehow took an entire panel of glass out of one of the basement windows (he didn’t break it, just laid it down) so he could escape and go woo the female cat next door. He wasn’t even five months old then. Her boyfriend took offense and beat Bandit up twice. That didn’t stop him. That cat had the largest balls I’ve ever seen. They were HUGE and he was very proud of them.
Two weeks after the operation Bandit sat down and groomed himself down there. He licked and he licked, and then he stopped and stared at himself, as if to say “Hey, wait a minute! I had more than THAT down there! WTH?”
When I started giggling uncontrollably and laughing so hard I nearly fell over he raised his head and gave me a very dirty look. He might have been offended that I was laughing, but I had the feeling he knew I was responsible. Bandit stared at me hard for another full minute, then he slowly stood up and walked into my mother’s bedroom. He stayed with her the rest of the day and ignored me.
Poor kitty, the male cats we neutered from a feral colony are young so maybe they don’t realize that their male parts are so important LOL.
Maybe there is a point there. We have to neuter cats but we do it rather casually. If we did this to other people (and some people need it!) there’d be uproar.