A Michael Broad Blog
Domestic cat maternal aggression is also referred to as maternal protective aggression. It’s what you think it is: a queen’s protective behaviour towards perceived threats to her kittens. It’s a natural instinct when she is caring for her young. In Peter Neville’s book Do Cats Need Shrinks? a client of his, Susan Swift, asked …
There have been some contraceptive pills for cats available in the past but as I understand it, they produce side effects that were unwelcome and/or they are not a hundred percent effective which is why people go for the surgical route on feline contraception. There is a third option which is artificial stimulation of …
Here are 4 facts about calling female cats ‘queens’. I think that there is a misconception by quite a large number of people about how this description came about and is used. Why is a female cat called a queen? The answer is because “when she is on heat, she lords it over the …
There is an official world record for the largest number of kittens in a single litter. The source of the information is, of course, the Guinness World Records website. They state very succinctly that the world’s largest litter of domestic cats were born on 7 August 1970 when a Burmese/Siamese cat belonging to V. …
Tomcats can’t, it seems, tell the difference between females who have been spayed and those that have not been spayed. This information comes from Dr. John Bradshaw in his book Cat Sense It is based upon his admittedly “casual observations”. He writes that “tomcats seem unable to distinguish between neutered females that form the …
Why does my female cat refuse to mate? The most common reason why a female cat refuses to mate is that the proposed mating is taking place at the wrong time in her oestrus cycle and usually during proestrus. If she is at the correct stage of her breeding cycle but still refuses to …
A kitten’s mother typically starts to wean him/her in the fourth or fifth week of their life. It may be earlier if: the litter is large or; the mother is stressed or; the mother is unwell. The mother (‘queen’ in cat fancy parlance) drives the process of weaning her kittens. Dr Bradshaw says that …
Dr. John Bradshaw in his book Cat Sense writes that if a mother is highly stressed during her pregnancy her stress hormones may cross the placenta and impair the development of her kittens’ brains and endocrine systems. The endocrine system refers to the kitten’s hormones. I wanted to check this and expand on it. …
