Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [88]
All this said, and wicked as it is to add to the oversupply of cats, fairness forces me to admit that a litter of kittens is by all odds the solidest entertainment value known to man. What can stage or screen offer that will keep us watching for weeks, cause us to neglect all else to watch, and make us laugh until the tears come, not just once but every evening for months? And all in the comfort of our own homes, all for the price of a little cat food.
And perhaps a stud fee. To be cynical, it helps to have purebreds when it’s time to look for good homes. People who would turn up their noses at the most charming litter of blacks and grays and stripers will stand in line for our Persians or Siamese, and take good care of them too. People respect monetary value, and they like to think they’re getting something valuable for nothing. The ordinary shorthair is not valuable, because of the aforementioned oversupply. It’s common as dandelions, common as water, or bread, or sunlight, and any Tom, Dick, or Harry can have all he wants for the asking. When the neighbors’ children come knocking with a carton full of kittens to give away, we are being pestered, not offered a gift beyond price. If the market could be cornered, if we could control the supply and pass restrictive ownership laws like the Egyptians', a litter of common kittens could make us richer than Whittington, but barring some disastrous epidemic it seems unlikely to happen.
The other advantage to purebred kittens is that you know roughly what you’re going to get. The domestic shorthair, no matter how personally attractive, can surprise you with kittens God himself wouldn’t adopt.
The female cat doesn’t ovulate until copulation; copulation stimulates the ovaries to release the ova, which take up with any sperm they happen to meet. A cat can have kittens sired by two or three or more toms, each one more squinch-eyed, bowlegged, lanky, and particolored than the last. The lineup of patchwork pirates courting Betsy in the backyard spoke poorly for the futures of their offspring until the black cat showed up. He was partly Persian, fluffy, and round of eye and ear, all black and clearly a gentleman, dismayed by the bad language and scuffling among the competition; he seemed to have brought candy and flowers instead of brass knuckles. I invited him in. I locked him in the laundry room with Betsy for the night. In the morning I gave him breakfast, thanked him, and sent him home.
There were four kittens, three of them with “alley” stamped all over them. The fourth was Sidney. His whiskers were a curving waterfall of whisker, his round gold eyes were outlined with mascara, his nose was a sculpture of a nose, and all about him was shaped with generous grace. (Unfortunately, he was black and white in irregular patches, with a crooked black mustache, and ignorant people laughed and called him the Hitler Kitten. It takes cat people to see through the fur to the quality of cat beneath.)
From the way the female in heat carries on, you’d think any tom at all would do, but there does seem to be a certain selectivity at work, incomprehensible as it looks to us. Friends of mine had two cats, mother and daughter, who obliged the neighborhood toms by going into heat simultaneously, and obliged each other by babysitting their simultaneous