Catwatching (10 page)

Conversely, really efficient killers have to experience a kittenhood which exposes them to as much hunting and killing as possible. The very best hunters are those which, as youngsters, were able to accompany their mother on the prowl and watch her dealing with prey.

Also, at a more tender age, they benefited from her bringing prey to the nest to show them. If the mother does not bring prey to the kittens in the nest between the sixth and twentieth week of their lives, they will be far less efficient as hunters in later life.

The scene is familiar enough. A kitten tires of stalking and chasing a ball. It suddenly and without warning flips one of its paws under the ball, flinging it up into the air and backwards over its head. As the ball flies through the air, the kitten swings round and follows it, pouncing on it and 'killing' it yet again. As a slight variation, faced with a larger ball, it will perform the backward flip using both front feet at the same time. The usual interpretation of this playful behaviour is that the kitten is being inventive and cunningly intelligent. because its toy will not fly up into the air like a living bird, the kitten 'puts life into it' by flinging the ball over its shoulder, so that it can then enjoy pursuing the more excitingly 'lively' preysubstitute. This credits the kitten with a remarkable capacity for creative play – for inventing a bird in flight. In support of this idea is the fact that no adult cat hunting a real bird would use the 'flip-up' action of the front paws. This action, it is argued, is the truly inventive movement, reflecting the kitten's advanced intelligence. unfortunately this interpretation is wrong. It is based on an ignorance of the instinctive hunting actions of the cat.

In the wild state, cats have three different patterns of attack, depending on whether they are hunting mice, birds or fish. With mice, they stalk, pounce, trap with the front feet and then bite. With birds they stalk, pounce and then, if the bird flies up into the air, they leap up after it, swiping at it with both front feet at once. If they are quick enough and trap the bird's body in the pincer movement of their front legs, they pull it down to the ground for the killing-bite. less familiar is the way in which cats hunt for fish. They do this by lying in wait at the water's edge and then, when an unwary fish swims near, they dip a paw swiftly into the water and slide it rapidly under the fish's body, flipping the fish up out of the water. The direction of the flip is back and over the cat's shoulders, and it flings the fish clear of the water.

As the startled fish lands on the grass behind the cat, the hunter swings round and pounces. If the fish is too large to be flipped with the claws of just one front foot, then the cat may risk plunging both front feet into the water at once, grabbing the fish from underneath with its extended claws and then flinging the prey bodily backwards over its head. It is these instinctive fishing actions that the kittens are performing with their 'flip-up' of the toy ball, not some new action they have learned or invented. The reason why this has been overlooked in the past is because few people have watched cats fishing successfully in the wild, whereas many people have seen their pets leaping up at birds on the garden lawn. A Dutch research project was able to reveal that the scooping up of fish from the water, using the 'flip-up' action, matures surprisingly early and without the benefit of maternal instruction. Kittens allowed to hunt fish regularly from their fifth week of life onwards, but in the absence of their mother, became successful anglers by the age of seven weeks. So the playful kitten throwing a ball over its shoulder is really doing no more than it would do for real, if it were growing up in the wild, near a pond or river.

This occurs when they are nearly a year old, but there is a great deal of variation. For toms, the youngest recorded age for sexual maturity is six months, but this is abnormal. Eight months is also rather precocious, and the typical male does not become sexually active until he is between eleven and twelve months of age. For toms living rough, it may be considerably longer – more like fifteen to eighteen months, probably because they are given less chance in the competition with older males. For females, the period can be relatively short, six to eight months being usual, but very young females only three to five months old have been known to come into sexual condition. This early start seems to be caused by the unnatural circumstances of domestication. For a wild cat, ten months is more usual. The European Wild Cat, for instance, starts its breeding season in March. There is a gestation period of sixty-three days and then the kittens appear in May.

By late autumn they strike off on their own and, if they survive the winter, they will themselves start to breed the following March when they are about ten months old, producing their own litters when they are a year old. For these wild cats there is only one season a year, so young toms may have to be patient and wait for the following season before they go into action. This wild cycle is obviously geared to the changing seasons and the varying food supply, but for the pampered pet there are no such problems. With its hunting ears finely tuned to the metallic sound of a can-opener and with the central-heating humming gently in the background, the luxuriating house cat has little to fear from the annual cycle of nature. As a result, its breeding sequences are less rigid than its wild counterpart. It may breed as early as the second half of January, producing a litter by the beginning of April.

Two months later, with its kittens weaned and despatched to new homes, it may well start off again with another breeding sequence, producing a second litter in the late summer. With this loss of a simple annual rhythm, there is a whole scatter of ages among young domestic cats, leading to the variations in the stages at which they become sexually active. Cases have been reported of wild cats producing a second litter in August, but it is suspected that this only occurs where there has been interbreeding between the wild animals and feral domestic cats.

Without restraint a cat population can increase at a startling rate.

This is because female cats are excellent mothers, and because domestication has led to a possible tripling of the number of litters and to an increase in litter size. European Wild Cats, with their single litter each year, have an average of two to four kittens, but domestic cats may produce an average of four to five kittens in each of their three annual litters. A simple calculation, starting with a single breeding pair of domestic cats, and allowing for a total of fourteen kittens in each three-litter year, reveals that in five years' time there will be a total of 65,536 cats. This assumes that all survive, that males and females are born in equal numbers and that they all start breeding when they are a year old. In reality, the females might start a little younger, so the figure could be higher. But against this is the obvious fact that many would perish from disease or accident. This paints a grim picture for the aspiring house mouse, a nightmare world of wall-to-wall cats. But it never materializes because there are enough responsible human owners to ensure that breeding restraints are applied to their pet cats, to keep the numbers under control. Neutering of both males and females is now commonplace and it is estimated that more than 90 per cent of all toms have suffered the operation. Females that are allowed to breed may have their litter size reduced to one or two, the unfortunate kittens being painlessly killed by the local vet. In some areas there are fairly ruthless extermination programmes for feral and stray cats, and in certain countries there have even been oral contraceptive projects, with the stray cat population given food laced with 'the pill'.

Israel, for example, claims to prevent about 20,000 kittens a year by using this technique. Despite these attempts, however, there are still well over a million feral and stray cats in Great Britain at the present time. It has been estimated that there are as many as half a million in the London region alone. In addition there are between four and five million pet cats, making a massive feline population of roughly one cat per ten humans.

Cats spend a great deal of time building up to the mating act, and their prolonged 'orgies' and promiscuity have given them a reputation for lasciviousness and lust, over the centuries. This is not because the mating act itself is lengthy or particularly erotic in form. In fact, the whole process of copulation rarely exceeds ten seconds and is often briefer than that. What gives the felines their reputation for lechery is the superficial resemblance between their sexual gatherings and a Hell's Angels gang-bang. There is a female, spitting and cursing and swiping out at the males one moment and writhing around on the ground the next. And there is a whole circle of males, all growling and howling and snarling at one another as they take it in turns (apparently) to rape the female. The truth is slightly different.

Admittedly, the process may take hours, even days, of non-stop sexual activity, but it is the female who is very much in charge of what is happening. It is she who calls the tune, not the males. It begins when the female comes on heat and starts calling to the males. They also respond to her special sexual odours and are attracted from all around. The male on whose territory she has chosen to make her displays is initially strongly favoured, because other males from neighbouring territories will be scared at invading his ground. But a female on heat is more than they can resist, so they take the risk.

This leads to a great deal of maleto-male squabbling (and accounts for most of the noise – which is why the caterwauling and howling is thought of, mistakenly, as sexual, when in reality it is purely aggressive). But the focus of interest is the female and this helps to damp down the male-to-male fighting and permits the gathering of a whole circle of males around her. She displays to them with purring and crooning and rolling on the ground, rubbing herself and writhing in a manner that fascinates the male eyes fixating upon her. Eventually one of the males, probably the territory owner himself, will approach her and sit close to her. For his pains, he is attacked with blows from her sharp-clawed forepaws. She spits and growls at him and he retreats. Any male approaching her too soon is seen off in this way.

She is the mistress of the situation and it is she who will eventually choose which male may approach her more intimately. The male who succeeds in this may or may not be the dominant tom present. That is up to her. But certain male strategies do help the toms to succeed.

The most important one is to advance towards her only when she is looking the other way. As soon as she turns in his direction the male freezes like a child playing the party game called 'statues'. She only attacks when she sees the actual advance itself, not the immobile body that has somehow, by magic, come a little nearer. In this way a tom with finesse can get quite close. He offers her a strange little chirping noise and, if she gives up spitting and hissing at him, he will eventually risk a contact approach. He starts by grabbing the scruff of her neck in his jaws and then carefully mounts her. If she is ready to copulate she flattens the front of her body and raises her rump up into the air, twisting her tail to one side. This is the posture called 'lordosis' and is the final invitation signal to the male, permitting him to copulate.

As time goes on, the 'orgy' changes its style. The males become satiated and are less and less interested in the female. She, on the other hand, seems to become more and more lustful. Having worked her way through one male after another at comparatively short intervals for perhaps several days, one might imagine that she too would be satiated, but this is not so. As long as her peak period of heat persists she will want to be mated, and the toms now have to be encouraged. Instead of playing hard to get, she now has to work on the males to arouse their interest. She does this with a great deal of crooning, rubbing and especially writhing on the ground. The males still sit around watching her, and from time to time manage to muster enough enthusiasm to mount her once more.

Eventually it is all over and the chances of a female cat returning home unfertilized after such an event are utterly remote.

At first sight this appears to be a piece of macho brutality, in similar vein to the cartoon caveman grabbing his mate by her hair and dragging her off to his cave. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In sexual matters it is the female, not the male, who is dominant, where cats are concerned. Toms may fight savagely among themselves, but when they are sexually aroused and attempting to mate with the queen they are far from bossy. It is the female who swipes out and beats the toms. The bite on the back of her neck may look savage, but in reality it is a desperate ploy on the part of the male to protect himself from further assault.

This protection is of a special kind. It is not a matter of forcibly holding down the female so that she cannot twist round and attack him.

She is too strong for that. Instead it is a 'behaviour trick' played by the male. All cats, whether male or female, retain a peculiar response to being grabbed firmly by the scruff of the neck, dating back to their kitten days. Kittens have an automatic reaction to being held in this way by their mother. She uses it when it is necessary to transport the kittens from an unsafe to a safe place. It is crucially important that the kittens do not struggle on such occasions, where their very lives may be at stake. So felines have evolved a 'freeze' reaction to being taken by the scruff of the neck – a response which demands that they stay quite still and do not struggle. This helps the mother in her difficult task of moving the litter to safety. When they grow up, cats never quite lose this response, as you can prove to yourself by holding an adult pet cat firmly by the skin of its neck.