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Nine Lives, Many Kittens
May 1, 2012
Cats are remarkable creatures for a multitude of reasons. They are intelligent, mysterious, stealthy, comical, affectionate, aloof, graceful, royal, and several dozen other adjectives. It is no wonder why they were domesticated and have been our companions for thousands of years. But there are some less desirable facts about cats, one of the most prominent being related to their great reproductive capabilities. Let’s look at some of the numbers.
A cat reaches sexual maturity at around 7 to 9 months old, though sometimes as early as 6 months. They are considered for the most part to be seasonally reproductive, giving birth in the spring or summer. Female cats are “induced ovulators”, meaning that once they go into heat they don’t immediately release eggs. Instead, they will continue to cycle in and out of heat until they mate. Anyone who has been around a cat in heat can attest to how annoying this can be! Once a cat mates, the female is pregnant for about two months (61-63 days on average) and will give birth to a litter that averages 2-5 kittens (though there can be up to 10 in some litters). In studies, cats average 1.4 litters per year, with some rare cats having as many as three in a year. In stray cats, the kitten survival rate to adulthood can be as low as 50%, or even lower in some situations.
How about we crunch some of that data? Let’s take an average female who goes into heat at 8 months old, has 4 kittens in every litter, and 50% of the litter survives (2 kittens). Since there is an average 50/50 ratio of males to females, in each litter there is one female that survives to have kittens on her own. So in the first year we have two cats (male and female) that becomes four (2 surviving kittens), with one of them being female. In about nine months both females give birth, and assuming the above survival rate we now have eight cats. Fast-forward another nine months and we now have 16 cats, and then the numbers keep creeping up exponentially. According to one study, in seven years two cats can result in a total of anywhere from 98 to 5,000 cats! Since a cat can live an average of 13-16 years (and some longer), the number is even greater over a lifetime!
Obviously these numbers are a very compelling reason to spay and neuter your cats. In many communities there are programs that will spay/neuter and then release stray or feral cats to try to keep the wild population down. But reproduction is not the only reason to have your cats “fixed”. Incident rates of certain kinds of cancer are significantly reduced after spaying. Male cats have a very high likelihood of “spraying” urine to mark their territory, and the odor is strong and difficult to eliminate. You have higher aggression rates with intact cats, and fighting carries risks of abscess and transmission of serious diseases such as feline leukemia and feline AIDS.
Cats are indeed wonderful pets. Talk to your vet about spaying or neutering to help keep them that way.