Friendly Genes
Spaying and neutering cats seems uncontroversial. Clearly, if we care about cats, we should make sure all cats are well fed and cared for, and a burgeoning population of feral cats due to overbreeding makes that nigh impossible. So we should spay and neuter our cats to make sure they don’t add to the population should they get out and start romancing with the local feral cats.
Not so fast, says cat expert John Bradshaw. In his book Cat Sense, he points out one tiny flaw in that reasoning. By making sure all our well-loved house cats can’t reproduce, he writes, we may be selecting for the wrong traits.
When we spay and neuter our adorable, loving house cats, we prevent the genes that contribute to their wonderful personalities from being passed on to a new generation of (mostly) sweet tempered, adorable kitties. Meanwhile, feral cats — cats who are mostly wary of humans and typically the least friendly and therefore the least likely to make great house cats — are out there breeding like crazy.
After a time, the only kittens available for adoption are kittens whose genes come from wily, suspicious, fearful, and sometimes aggressive cats who don’t much care for humans.
In short, if we’re not careful, we’ll soon find that we’ve unintentionally bred a population of unadoptable cats. They don’t want to live with us, and frankly, we don’t much want them to.
Obviously, the solution is not to forgo spaying and neutering our cats. That would be irresponsible and unfair to the public as well as to the cat population. Kitten mills are certainly not the solution, either; that’s for sure. Bradshaw recommends a completely different approach. We should, he says, continue to spay and neuter feral cats and most of our domestic cats. But we should let some of our friendly, loving pet cats breed — not repeatedly and randomly, but enough to keep friendly genes in the cat population.
Stay curious,
Avery