Why do female cats tend to want to bite their partners when mating?

Why do female cats tend to want to bite their partners when mating? The answer – which I am sure a lot of people now know – is because the male cat’s penis is an instrument of torture covered as it is with short, sharp spines. It damn well hurts the female when he extricates it from her. She takes a swipe because it feels like he has attacked her.

The spikes point backwards away from the tip so it is easy to insert but the same cannot be said about its removal. As it rakes the walls of the vagina it causes a sudden shock of intense pain to which the female reacts with a scream and a swipe (or perhaps a bite).

The spines are fixed and the male cat has no option other than to cause this discomfort. The sexually virile cats have the biggest spines! Nature can be wickedly harsh sometimes. So why the feline sadomasochism?

There is a reason for it (thank God). Unlike female humans who ovulate at regular intervals female cats only ovulate after they have mated with a male.

The trigger for ovulation is the intense pain and shock the female cat (queen) experiences when during heat her first male withdraws his spiny penis.

As Dr Morris so aptly puts it:

“This violent moment acts like the firing of a starting pistol which sets her reproductive hormonal system in operation.”

As the female mates with other males during her period of ‘heat’ the ovulation which starts in about 25 to 30 hours results in pregnancy.

And let’s remember that after copulation, which last a brief few seconds, within 30 minutes the female is ready to go again and suffer the same masochistic pain. This particular sort of pain does not act as a barrier to this activity.

Can you imagine what would happen to the global population of humans and the relationship between males and females if we had the same reproductive process! It does not bear imagining.

P.S. Does neutering a male at the earliest opportunity result in his penis being smaller than it should be or could have been?