Cat Lover and Dreamer
by Michael
(Ponca City, OK)
Yes, I am a cat lover and a dreamer. Actually, I am an animal lover and my dream is that we, humans, learn to live in harmony with other animals on the planet; that we learn to respect them, give them space and stop killing them for the wrong reasons.
I glimpsed a bit of that dream, at sun up, today in Oklahoma on the A1 Savannah farm. Here is what I mean:
Harmony at A1 Savannahs Farm
The light was warm, the animals (including me) were in harmony with each other. It was very still and quiet. The wind was as warm as the light and it gently brushed against me. A warm wind is comforting and a little melancholy, I think.
The animals followed me on to the prairie. It had an African quality – very African, in fact.
If only it could always be like this.
Which brings me with a jolt to the subject of cat breeding. The idea of being in harmony with nature can and should extend to cat breeding. It is a process that should, in my personal view, be as natural as possible.
Horse love bites a sheep!
Two subjects come to mind in relation to that sentence. Firstly, the appearance of the cat should be as natural as possible. We should follow nature’s lead. Nature knows best because it has evolved over eons. The cat is a top predator, almost perfectly formed. Should we tinker with that? Do we know better than nature? And if we do tinker because we think we know best, what happens? Answer: we always pay a price in some shape or form.
Some breeders think they know better than nature. Take the flat faced Persian. They think this abnormal looking cat improves on nature but how can it when the deformities bred into it cause ill health? There are other examples but I don’t want to sound too provocative.
On a more subtle level, there is the process of cat breeding. A female cat’s sexual activity is governed by the amount of daylight that she is exposed to daily.
This fact presents a temptation to us to use it in our favour if we are a breeder. Do breeders artificially vary the amount of light that a female is subjected to in order to increase the number of litters? I am told that some do. If that is the case it is unnatural and I say counterproductive in the long term. There may be an initial gain but in the long term nature will react and balance things out. Over the long term, I say that this kind lack of respect for nature is short-sighted and based on short-termism, a poor way of doing things.
I am a cat lover and dreamer but also a realist. We can make the dream become a reality.
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Associated pages:
Domestic cat reproduction and development
