Dr John Bradshaw
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2012
last heard May 2012
Dr John Bradshaw’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, I think at first, maybe for the first year, that is probably what could happen, although all of those numbers kind of assume that the cats are going to get plenty to eat and that they are going to start reproducing at a rather younger age than perhaps they normally do.
But certainly after the first year or two, you're going to have so many cats around that all sorts of other things begin to limit the cat population.
Finding enough to eat, finding enough places to go to have litters and that sort of thing.
And the population starts to stabilise.
Precisely.
I mean, the only time I suspect that has ever happened has actually been in ancient Egypt when they used to breed cats for sacrifice and mummification.
And it looks as if those assembly lines, if you like, were incredibly efficient.
But in the real world, when the cats are having to find homes, they're having to go through rescue or just roam around and look for homes.
then all sorts of other things will limit the population.
Absolutely, and even with females couldn't do that anyway.
That would require you to extrapolate from males, which of course can father litters at a much higher rate than females can produce litters.
I don't know of any reliable figures.
I think you can look at it from the other end, though, which is that if you stop reproduction by females by neutering them, what proportion of females need to be neutered for the population to stabilise
Because the cat is so reproductively active and fecund, then it's actually very high.
It's around 98%.
Do you have to neuter pretty much all female cats to have any impact on the cat population?
That's right.
I mean, if you get above 98%, you do start to see the cat population shrinking in a particular area.
But anything much less than about 98% of females being neutered, within an area, there are enough kittens to satisfy the demand.
What are neutering rates?
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