Posted by Jeanne on February 19, 2009
Whether they prowl by day or night, all cats are constantly prepared for an encounter with the opposite sex. For much of the time this will involve little more than long, whining conversations, occasionally exploding into a squawking, spitting, short-lived fight.
In season, however, conditions change. The female is swept by huge, imperative waves of sexual desire and goes seeking a tom to assuage her. This may happen a few times a year or many, depending on the cat. It is a seizure of emotion fierce, primitive, and unembarrassed. The docile cat of the week before becomes restless and filled with anguished longing. She pads about, tense, nervous, tail switching. She rolls, writhes, and undulates. She is yielding, receptive, and female in every sense.
Her voice changes. She cries, piercingly, demandingly, and incessantly, for a tom to come and relieve her. And come he does. Yowling, potent and all male, he comes in great numbers and from miles around.
What follows is so natural, unabashed and public that squeamish human beings may become quite distressed. The toms form a wide, interested ring around the female – or queen, as she is called. Fights break out sporadically among the males – screaming, spluttering tangles that add mightly to the general tension of the affair. Before the session has ended, one of the several who have mated with her is likely to have impregnated her.
His prime function accomplished, the male goes out of the female’s life. And she, her passions cooled, becomes her old mannerly self again.
Posted by Jeanne on February 18, 2009
Even in thickly settled communities, there is a wide range of game for a cat. Aside from mouse and rat who, though unwelcome, have always stayed close to man’s side, there are squirrels, chipmunks, moles, shrews, young rabbits, and other small, furry, squeaky creatures that stir the killer instinct in the cat.
On the prowl, her ears attuned to the merest whispers of sound, the gentle tabby becomes a destroyer as fearsome to her prey as any of her wild cousins. Her cautious footfall is silent, her gaze alert, her proud tail is carried low.
When the quarry comes into view, she crouches, head outthrust, eyes level, and intent. With infinite stealth – “What I don’t like about cats is that they’re so sneaky” — she eases forward, acutely responsive to every attitude of vigilance or torpor in her prey. As she comes into range, her chin juts out just over her evenly placed front paws, her eyes are electric. Her hind legs are gathered under her, the muscles of her haunches flexing alternately as she seeks the ideal footing for the takeoff. Tension is drained off through the switching tail, leaving the body superbly poised, almost relaxed.
The leap is high and short, a pounce which brings the front paws reaching forward, with claws distended. The canines bite, searching for spine or brain.
The kill may be swift or lingering. The killer toying with her victim is no spectacle for sentimentalists or true-blue sportsmen, but in time the cat slays the mouse and gravely eats it. (Many cats, however, prefer to lay the mouse on the doorstep as a trophy, and all cats enjoy being praised for their accomplishment.)
There is, of course, no use in placing a moral value on the performance. Nature permits many unequal struggles and miserable deaths — and so does man, who invented the ASPCA in order to restrain himself.
A cat may be frightened or discouraged from hunting at all, but she will not change her techniques. About all the distressed human can do is not look, or dispatch the mouse himself, remembering that few mice are as pleasant or hygienic as Mr. Disney’s.
By late afternoon the daytime cat usually returns from wherever she’s been and checks in at home. She may scratch at the door or stand on a window sill to call attention to her arrival. Or perhaps she will sit on the porch, cleaning her fur and gazing at the world until noticed and invited in.
The aroma of the family dinner cooking in the kitchen will set the cat to clamoring for her own, and after being fed she most likely will settle down for the evening. She might be tempted to play with a string or a catnip mouse, but the chances are that she will prefer to find a spot — under a lamp or on top of a warm television set — in which to rest, relax and sleep. This is the time cats purr loudest.