- Joined
- Mar 14, 2014
- Messages
- 2,171
- Purraise
- 1,213
I will add that I've not seen this happen before but I do wonder if there are dogs or raccoons in the neighborhood? They will kill a cat, especially a kitten.
It sounds like your overwhelmed with kittens there @Bessie Glavas Have you tried getting anyone to help you with the TNR? Try Alley Cat Allies, The Humane Society or the SPCA. Once you've got the toms neutered and all the females spayed the fighting will stop and then you can concentrate on finding homes for the kittens. You really need to get the whole colony fixed before you do any more. The females will keep producing litters faster than you can re-home them and, as you know, feral kittens have very short sad lives.
The big black patriarch in "my colony" is very protective of his offspring - won't even eat the food I put out until everyone else has had their fill. Unfortunately, when the females are still very young he tries (and I guess succeeds) to have litters with them. I hate seeing this, they seem so scared and it's almost brutal. Of course I yell at him & chase but I'm not there all the time and can't run.
As an aside, I bought traps & succeeded in neutering one cat then had a bad knee injury. So the traps sit out on the porch waiting for me. I have put up ads for someone to help me with this, but so far have only gotten suggestions regarding someone else I can call....who then suggests someone else. Guess everyone is overwhelmed with kittens.
I know that female cats often have multiple partners and their litters can be quite mixed. One of my colony messed around with an orange male that showed up a few months ago - I think a stray that someone dropped off in the neighborhood. Though not friendly, he was very well fed & unscarred - but that is changing. He's trying to take over the colony and was involved in a fight-to-the-death with the black patriarch. I went outside & scared him off.
I bring this up because one of the females brought me a gorgeous kitten (8 weeks?) to meet. The kitten had lots of orange, as well as black & white. I don't know if she had other kittens that I never saw (they usually bring their babies out to start eating after dusk, for their protection). Do the patriarchs will kittens in a litter that are not theirs but leave the others alone? Around the same time that she brought this kitten, two other kittens were found dead in the neighborhood. One was also mixed, the other gray.
Hiya.. So this morning i woke up to a hurtful screaming.. I thought it was our kitten having her litter but i actually found our male less than a year old boy cat trying to mate with this other little kitten..also the little kitten looks like its eyes have just opened has a nasty gash in its ear from our male cat hurting it. He has stolen it from somewhere.. He's always hunted since he was tiny.. But this act made me google his actions... Can anyone enlighten me on this situation plzNow that I have some time, let me try to further explain. In the wild the ferals come together to form colonies (thus expeling the notion that cats are anti-social) A Tom will be the matriarch of the clan and if a female that he did not mate with, gives birth, he will go in and kill all of her kittens. I will spare you how he does this, but it usually does not leave a mark on the kittens. The mom in her anguish is thrown back into a heat cycle, he mates with her, thus strengthening HIS line and assuring that this colony is under his control and that they will survive.
He also will drive off any unneutered male that arrives, and will make sure he only has so many females with him. Neutered males, he doesn't even concern himself with, unless they try to overthrow him.
Domesticated cats do not do this type of behavior, and in many cases will also help the mom to care for the babies and interact with them as they grow, play fighting with them.
Is the male cat neutered? Why not get the momma cat spayed so she can stop having kittens?My male cat isn't feral but he killed 3 kittens. Now the momma cat is mourning her babies. Have a new set that born in a rabbits cage I had laying around hopefully these will be safe.
Good job getting him neutered.
My tom (not feral) not only killed one of his 3 day old kittens, he ate everything except the head and one foot. A rather gruesome discovery. The kittens were inside and we had been keeping them locked in a crate with the queen for the first three days. I made the mistake of leaving the crate open at 5am so she could eat and use the litter box and my son found the kitten head at 7:30am. No raccoons in the house. I have seen his handiwork with mice and rats. We are going to be much more careful with keeping them locked up and he is getting neutered in two days. Hopefully after a couple weeks he will be less hormonal. I am pretty worried because we want to keep a kitten (the one he killed was one of the two we were thinking of keeping). I am scared he might continue to go after it later.