Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Tortie Tuesday: So You Want to Be a Grandmother Cat

(Translated whimsically from the nonverbal communication of Serena, an awesome classic calico cat. Serena's timely decision to share mothering responsibilities with her daughter, Silver, allowed three of Silver's four kittens to survive a glyphosate poisoning episode, though none of Serena's own kittens survived. The three kittens are now growing rapidly, being nursed by both adult cats. In view of Serena's reaction when Silver's brother and sister were adopted at about this age, these kittens are NOT YET available for adoption. Other kittens are. Visit a shelter...litters of mixed-breed kittens are rarely petnapped, so you can probably adopt them with a clear conscience.)

The human and I are sure that someone Out There thinks she wants to try being a social cat grandmother. Certainly this is a rewarding job but the reader should know that it’s not as easy as I make it look. Few things are.


(Serena is washing the face of E the Explorer, while Daisy Chain lurks in the background. Further from the camera are incomplete images of Silver nursing Burly. It's hard to tell whether the kittens have accepted these as permanent names yet; they still answer to voices rather than names.)

Well, first, of course, you have to have been a mother cat for at least one year. Some kittens have been known to have kittens of their own before they were a year old, but social kittens seem to wait until they’re old enough to do the job right.

It is not necessary to have kittens of your own to help bring up your grandkittens, and it certainly is not necessary to lose the dear little things only a few days after your grandkittens are born. That happened because the Bad Neighbor caused that smell that the wind always has for a few hours before everyone feels ill. I have lost several kittens after that smell was in the air! It ought to be the Bad Neighbor who lies down and dies. There is no justice in this world. However, as the grandmother cat you do not have to be lactating when your grandkittens are born, unless your daughter is completely unable to nurse them. (Actually Silver was not completely unable to nurse, but she lacked confidence.) As a social cat you will visit the babies; they will sniff about and find where your milk will come in, and given a chance, they will start the hormone cycle, and in a day or two your milk will come in. Even normal cats usually start lactation easily, and most of us enjoy it.

The problem with lactation is getting enough food and water to support the cycle. Feral cats, and cats who conceal their kittens from their humans, sometimes have a hard time lactating because they have to work too hard to get food and water. Their own bodies start to compete with their kittens’ needs for nutrition. This can cause the adult cats, the kittens, or both to become ill. I suppose nature gave social cats the ability to nurse one another’s kittens so that everyone would have a better chance to survive when food is hard to come by.

If you have not gone through a lactation cycle yourself you will be unprepared for the way it affects your hormones. Some of you may have been hard-bitten and hard-biting alley cats who thought you could always hunt down enough food for yourself and your family. Then your body starts pumping out prolactin in place of thyroxin, and where did your energy go? You feel mellow and languid all the time, and just want to lie about adoring your babies, purring, and snoozing. The babies’ father is likely to come around, inquiring whether you have got rid of the babies yet and when you want to try starting another lot. Nature has provided you just enough energy to redesign his ears and send him home, and after that, all you want to do is eat, drink, snuggle, and repeat. It gets old by the time kittens’ eyes open, but you feel too lazy to care. At least there is no need to worry about gaining weight during these lazy days. If you’re like me and have never been a very heavy eater, even preferring to let your possum eat some of your food rather than feel stuffed, you will find it hard to wake up and eat enough to maintain your weight, and will probably become thin. Though broad-framed.

Speaking of possums, dogs, and other inferior animals, this may sound coldhearted, but if they do happen to be old-for-their-species when that smell is on the wind, when you are nursing two litters at once it’s easier to say goodbye, as you need all every calorie you can get. It is hard to overstate the value of training a human to pay attention to your health, coat, and figure. A well trained human will guess that you are nursing kittens if you start to lose weight in spring, and will instinctively offer more and better food. This behavior should be encouraged. Now is the time to indulge any urges your human feels to cuddle you as if you were a baby human. It’s a special treat for them and it helps keep your prolactin levels up.

A very well trained human will enjoy seeing the kittens. If you want to reward especially good behavior, consider allowing the human to stroke the top of each little head with one finger. Further intimacies should be discouraged, though it can be hard to keep them from trying to scoop up your kittens in their hands to count toes and guess genders. With mine disapproval does not completely extinguish that behavior, but does keep it to a low level. (Disapproval plus minimal nest access kept the human from picking up my babies.)

Of course many of you live with humans who are not as well disciplined as ours and are likely to carry diseases to which your milk may not fully immunize your kittens. In that case you must do as you think best. Scratching and biting humans tends to confuse them and bring in other undesirable behaviors along with the behavior you were trying to correct, but even that is better than letting them infect your babies with diseases. We have heard of humans who will pick up and cuddle a kitten who obviously has distemper, then without even washing its hands, much less changing its clothes, immediately try to touch your kittens! Such things used to go on at oldfashioned “pet stores” and still go on at some shelters. They must be stopped by any means necessary. Humans can survive the loss of enormous quantities of blood.

But if you are confident that your human has no infections likely to harm you, and is steady and sensible enough not to harm your kittens, a little bonding between them may be a good thing. I’ll admit I don’t particularly like seeing my human make a fuss over anyone else but me…but I like seeing her make an effort to find the higher-protein kibble, and it’s a blessing to have her trained to bring the kittens indoors at night. The secret is to give them their last snack for the day and wait for the human to come to where they are snuggled up, purring and dozing, and take them inside. 

As soon as kittens’ eyes open they start to wonder about the world beyond the nest. When they wonder, they begin to wander. It takes a few days for them to build up the strength to leave the nest. You can keep them in the nest for four to six weeks if you try, but since Silver had somewhat lazily chosen a corner of the porch floor as a nest, there was no real chance of keeping them from wanting to explore. Again you must use your judgment. The sooner they start to leave the nest, the sooner they start to nibble at solid food. You may have to help them eliminate some disgusting messes if you let them do this too soon.

By the time spring kittens are toddling around the porch it will probably be summer. A great help to peace of mind can be obtained by training your human to deliver water on command. Even if your daughter is in full lactation by now, and the kittens are well fed and watered for today, this will not always be the case, so the kittens must learn to eat and drink by themselves. You can always run out to the spring, but the kittens can’t. Find a suitable container, sniff pointedly at it, and stare at your human. Despite the horror stories everyone has heard, the normal human reaction will be to pour some water into the container. Ideally they will say things like “Of course you want water! How stupid of me not to think of it sooner.” They are valuable friends but they are fairly dumb animals, and it never hurts to remind them so.

Then of course you have to teach the kittens how to drink water while you are still producing enough milk to support them, and at the same time you have to teach them to choose the right places to squat. This can be hard on them. They think they have just learned wonderful new skills. They want to show all their human friends, “See what I can do now!” It’s not faaair that so many humans will yell at them or put them out. Their control of their new skills is not perfect. If it were they would call the humans to follow them and see them “perform” in the sand pit, or litter box, or whatever. Learning to recognize that strange unpleasant smell as coming from them takes a few days after they have learned to eliminate their bodywastes all by themselves.

And then, as if you did not have enough to do being the Queen Cat, in order to keep your readers up to date, your human has to go into town and leave you alone with all of the responsibility for the property resting on your narrow little cat shoulders. 

Nevertheless, just like humans who wail and carry on about how busy and tired they are, deep down inside you will love being a grandmother cat. That is, of course, provided that you have been given the great good fortune to be a mother cat in the first place.

To those who aren’t cats of any kind, empathy purrs from Serena the Awesome Grandmother Cat…

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