Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [87]
We should check him for tumors. Give him a thorough feel from time to time. Palpate the breasts, males as well as females, and most especially females unspayed or spayed late in life. Under the last pair toward the rear are two normal fatty pouches, but these feel smooth; what you’re looking for feels nodular, like grape seeds. And check in his mouth for abnormal swellings or strange smells.
And make sure he can get up to his favorite places. Arrange steps and bridges. The view from the window is even more important in old age, and it’s sad to jump and miss and be confined to the floor because no one’s noticed you can’t make it anymore.
Some say all cats should have their ears washed weekly and be given thorough and regular baths. These, again, are the sterner sources, who may be recommending baths just to remind the cat who’s boss around here. It seems to me a bath should be considered therapeutic intervention, for fleas, or poisons on the fur, or an accidental deluge of filth like the time Sidney went up the chimney, rather than routine hygiene.
A cat, after all, is a very workable item just as it comes from the package, and to feel that we should be constantly adjusting and tinkering with it to keep it in working order is hubris. It doesn’t much need our advice on staying healthy. It’s clean, it’s sensible, and it doesn’t drink or smoke. Its only really deplorable physical habit is a relentless passion for making kittens.
11
Sex and Kittens
Cats are famous for sex. Lion couples have been clocked at 120 matings in a day. All that sex, all those kittens, are rarely in the best interests of either the mother or the unwanted young, but what cat resists?
Although there are perhaps 82 million cats living under American roofs, there are around 70 million homeless, living hard, and the shelters kill over 5 million every year. It’s irresponsible of the cats to keep adding to this tragedy, and irresponsible of us to let them.
“Neutering” is an unfortunate word. To neuter is to make neutral, to send to the sidelines, to make pale and wishy-washy, to negate, disarm, remove from the game. It sounds as if our bright, brisk cat were about to fade into a shadowy half-life more vegetable than animal. And even the most enlightened humans identify with this sexual obliteration, deep in their own organs, and shudder at murdering nature in their cats.
Men especially find castration hard to face, and when their loved Timmy or Charlie goes far afield in search of sex and gets killed by a car at the age of three, they console themselves with the natural, free life he led. They have lost their friend, and the cat has lost twelve or fifteen years of living, and the kittens he fathered probably led brief, desperate, and painful lives; the price is high.
There’s also a widespread feeling that the neutered male turns fat and sleepy and becomes a blob of a cat, neutral indeed, but this isn’t true. An intelligent cat will take up a number of peaceable, nonsexual pursuits and have time for all his hobbies; if he lives confined to an apartment and his hobby is food, he may indeed gain weight, but so would we all.
For the female, sex leads to what Don Marquis’s Mehitabel called “just one damned kitten after another,” but unspayed and unbred, her periods of fruitless yearning can lead, especially in the Siamese, to cystic ovaries and other female complications. They start young, too. At least one cat on record was pregnant when she was four months old. Between six and twelve months is more usual for the first heat. (“Heat” is considered vulgar, and nice people say “in season,” like shad or asparagus, while scientific types say “in estrus” because it’s always more delicate-minded to use words no one understands.) From then on her life, if unsupervised, consists of pregnancy, kittens, and pregnancy.
In truth, neutering is a wonderful release for a cat’s life. Up till the age of sexual maturity a cat’s world is wide and various and alive