Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [92]
In other times and places it was customary to drown the kittens at birth, so as not to become overburdened with cats, or, grudgingly, to “let her keep one.” Softer-hearted modern Americans are more likely to keep them all for as long as they’re young and cute, and then turn them out onto the streets at adolescence to fend for themselves. People like us, of course, bend every muscle to the task of having kind and responsible homes waiting for them when they’re ready for homes. In the meantime, we have kittens, an occasion for rejoicing.
Until very recently the word was to leave young kittens strictly alone. Touching and handling them made them sickly and upset their mother, and the family children had to stand well back from the box and gaze from a distance. Now the powers that decide these things have decided otherwise, and the word is reversed: kittens should be handled. It speeds their development and promotes human friendship later in life. With the usual scientific precision, they tell us that each kitten should be handled for twenty minutes a day for the first thirty days, though it’s unclear how they worked out this figure, and petting a blind, wriggling, screeching kitten for twenty minutes while its mother hovers anxiously could get tedious. With a litter of six it works out to a two-hour daily stint of kitten-touching, fourteen hours a week. It’s well to remember that, through the decades when handling was forbidden, legions of cats developed normally and found human friendship; all revelations should be swallowed tentatively.
Anyway, even if we can’t work the recommended schedule into our busy days, it’s nice to know we’re allowed to touch when we want to, though I’ve known mother cats who wouldn’t have stood for it, not with newborns. If we’d tried it on Chippy’s kittens she’d have hidden them for good and all. Discretion is advised.
Weaning is a cat’s first major step into the wide world. As early as four weeks we can start offering them a saucer of evaporated milk and water mixed with some meats for human babies and maybe a spoonful of baby rice flakes to give it body. They plunge their faces in it, sneeze and wade through it, dripping and bemused. Their mother may demonstrate by drinking it herself, and they may or may not bother to watch. Sometimes there’s one leader kitten, brighter or more curious and vigorous than the rest, the first one to scramble out of the box, who gets the point right away, and one shy and tentative one who doesn’t seem to care if he never learns. All go back to Mother for dessert; it puts them to sleep, round-bellied and still making blissful sucking noises in their dreams.
The mother, seeing our willingness to fill saucers, encourages the process. Makes herself less available. Supervises. Leads them to the dish. (Sometimes a childless cat will take her toys in for supper and arrange them around the bowl, heads, if they have heads, pointing toward it.)
The help we offer is highly acceptable, but proper cats should learn to earn their living in a pinch, and a good mother will bring in mice if mice are available and show the kittens what to do with them. Some cats seem to have made the mental leap from hunting to husbandry that took humans so many millennia: they start mouse farms, to ensure a steady supply. A friend of mine had a cat who kept mice in the bathtub, readily available and trapped by the slippery sides. One writer claims that his Siamese stored mice in his grand piano, and when the kittens grew up and went away she lost interest in the mice, being a good mother but not a serious hunter, and the unused supplies flourished and multiplied and made merry in the workings of the piano for years.
There’s a lot to the education of a kitten, and it’s best to leave them with their mothers for as long as possible, nine weeks at least. Unfortunately, weaning time, six weeks or so, is often considered