The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Author:Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345458698
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2002-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Is jealousy more common in male cats than in females? My own experience would indicate that it is. Moko has been much more prone to jealous bouts than Minnalouche. There are good reasons for this. Domestic female cats are the only members of the cat family, besides lions, who engage in communal nursing. While some feral female cats live solitary lives, others form small groups with other females. They will often use a communal nest, and the females will take care of kittens not their own rather easily. Not only will they nurse them, they will also sever umbilical cords and carry the kittens to new nest sites if toms threaten them. While this behavior has been observed, notably by D. W. Macdonald from Oxford University, it has never been studied in any detail, so there is still much to be learned about this fascinating behavior. Since the nests are communal, it could be argued that the mothers are never certain which is their own kitten. (The kittens may know, since they have their own nipple, but not necessarily the mother.) This is unlikely, however, since the kittens are often born weeks apart, and in any event, a mother cat knows from smell who her kittens are. It seems to be a true cooperation. In an infanticidal species (which, according to Macdonald, cats are)—that is, where male cats seek reproductive advantage by killing the kittens of a different father (though what mechanism the tom uses for knowing a strange kitten, and whether this implies he recognizes his own kittens, is still unclear), the females often live together in this fashion, the better to protect their young. For while infanticide brings advantages to the male, there is nothing in it for the female. The females, moreover, are almost certainly related, usually a mother and her daughters from previous litters. Therefore, if female cats have had practice in sharing, or are genetically programmed to share, it would make sense that they are less jealous in general than male cats.

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