A Michael Broad Blog
A person who wants to adopt a male cat might ask why they should neuter their cat if they are going to be indoors full-time and there will be no other cats in the home; no chance of procreation. Incidentally, the word “neuter” has two meanings. It can mean the removal of the male …
The term ‘ram-cat’ is an early name for a male cat. An alternative name at the time was ‘boar-cat’. Both these very old-fashioned terms were superseded by ‘tomcat’ in the 18th century. Today the word tomcat actually means an unneutered male cat; a street cat doing what tomcats do which is establish and defend …
To answer the question, you have to break it down into categories which I’ve done. There’s a difference between the behaviour of the wildcat ancestor which is the same species as the domestic cat and from which we can learn about domestic cat behaviour, unsterilised male cats, sterilised male cats and kittens parented by …
This is a question posed by a social media user accompanying a video of a beautiful ginger tabby cat enthusiastically licking a young kitten who is also a ginger tabby cat. The questioner does not explain if the kitten is the offspring of the male cat. It looks certain that they are. The interesting …
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 …
Female cats can be choosy in selecting a male and thereby procreate. She uses her courtship to select her favoured male or males. Males can impress females through the pungency of their urine. They are advertising their fitness and ability to procreate and create fit families through the smell of their urine. It’s remarkable …
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 …
This is a photograph from the Reddit.com website and the person who posted it asked: “Why do these babies look nothing like their mother?” There are two reasons. The first is superfecundation which means that when you see a litter of kittens as you do in the photograph, they might have more than one …
