Treecat Social Dynamics

ThinksMarkedly wrote:My argument was that treecats, as sentients themselves, do have this kind of thinking, which allows them to override the natural urges and apply rational limitations. And treecats most certainly do have education.

Wiki Informant

Your veterinarian can tell you the best time to spay or neuter your individual cat. Siamese cats, for example, are known for early sexual maturity.

Have you ever heard the yowling of a female cat in heat or the screams of two males fighting over a female? Believe me, heavy metal bands got nothin’ on them. Neither noise is anything you want to listen to for very long.

Living with an intact cat — male or female — is not an especially pleasant experience. Intact cats of both sexes are serious about territory, status and sex. Under the influence of their hormones, they roam and fight (especially males). Thanks to their teeth and claws, they are perfectly capable of maiming or killing one another. Keeping intact cats of the same sex together or letting intact cats of either sex roam outdoors is almost a guarantee of frequent and expensive vet bills. They can disappear for days in search of a mate and may come home with bite abscesses and other wounds from fights. They are also more likely to contract and spread diseases, such as feline leukemia virus and feline immunodeficiency virus.

Intact males are at greater risk for testicular cancer and prostate disease. Intact females have a higher risk of mammary and uterine cancer and serious uterine infections. Intact females who are allowed to roam will often fight with other females, and they incur the same risk of injury and disease as males. And, of course, having a litter is risky for females, especially if they are still no more than kittens themselves.

In my opinion, there’s no good reason to delay spaying or neutering your cat, unless you have a fine-quality pedigreed cat whose genes would contribute to the betterment of the breed. But, if you are considering doing so, there are a few important things you need to know about living with an intact feline.

Age and Time of Sexual Maturity

Female kittens reach sexual maturity anywhere from 3 1/2 to 12 months of age, with the typical range being 5 to 9 months. Male kittens generally reach sexual maturity at 9 to 12 months. The age at which this occurs is sometimes breed-related: Persians, for instance, tend to go into heat (estrus) at a later age than, say, Siamese, who are known for early maturity.

Cats also generally achieve a minimum body weight before puberty kicks in. It’s usually around five to six pounds for females and seven to eight pounds for males. Males can perform throughout the year if there’s a receptive female in reach.

Beyond age and weight, the amount of daylight available is one of the factors affecting when cats go into heat. The long days of spring and summer jump-start the hormonal system and put the reproductive cycle into play.

The typical “kitten season” in North America can range from February to October. During this period, females may go into heat more than once. Cycles vary from cat to cat.

The Intact Male

Intact male cats, commonly known as studs or toms, are all about territory. When your male cat reaches sexual maturity, he’s likely to start spraying your home and yard with stinky urine to establish his turf and ward off strange males. In rare instances, males don’t spray, but most will start sooner rather than later if they remain intact. Once the behavior is established, it’s difficult to eliminate, although neutering may help.

Breeders who keep stud cats typically have a separate indoor or outdoor run for them, so they don’t destroy furnishings or harass other cats in the home. A stud run should have plenty of vertical and horizontal space, and an outdoor run needs adequate shelter. In addition, the litterbox area must be far away from the cat’s food and water dishes.

Intact males who are not allowed to breed lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation and stress, while intact males who are allowed to mate may become aggressive. Neutered males, on the other hand, can be known for their sweet and affectionate temperaments.


What It Really Means When Your Cat Sits on You

Reference

ThinksMarkedly wrote:What is there for me to argue? The word is given: treecats who adopt seldom ever also find mates. You or I don't have to think this is how the story should have been told, but we're not the author. David decides and he decided they don't.

cthia wrote:I can't agree with that either. Override God's manifesto - and hardwiring - to "Go forth and multiply."

Even two-legs have a hard time (no pun intended) of doing so as well. That is why we need target rich environments which include bars, bunny ranches, courtesans and groundside shore leave. Even porno. We can side step the multiplication with subtraction. Abortion, manual stimulation, condoms, IUDs, and birth control. But the need, urge, and desire will always remain. Lest advanced age or failing health. If humans can't copulate, we become irritable, and some people oftentimes become criminal. In cases where we can no longer copulate because of failed equipment, the ever present desire prompts us into getting surgery to implant pumps which will enable us to continue to "salute the flag."

None of these options are available to a cat. Their mind cannot turn off their innate desire, and need, to procreate.

The author may say the adoption simply flips a switch. If such a switch exists in humans, we'd have it disconnected.

Let me give you an idea of what a Terran cat is up against. Of course, a treecat and a Terran cat are not the same.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And I am explicitly not making any comment on how often a treecat (male or female) must satisfy their body urges. I have no clue if that happens to them very often or if they go into Pon Farr only once every 7 Sphinxian years. The only evidence we have is that Nimitz did court Samantha once they were both on the same ship and she did get pregnant. We can't generalise from a sample of 1. Maybe Samantha was nearly harassed on every ship she was aboard; maybe she found Nimitz cute and asked him over.

cthia wrote:None of these options are available to a cat. Their mind cannot turn off their innate desire, and need, to procreate.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Sorry, says who? You'll have to prove those assertions with textev.

If you can't, then it's equally likely that there are options available to a treecat, including biological solutions like turning off their innate desires. Maybe they only procreate when the clan decides that it is time to increase the number of infants.

Who's to say that in a race of telepaths, the physical sensations are secondary to the mental stimulation? You're the one who brought "blow my mind" up.

I did say that this cannot have been the case for the entire duration of their evolution, as otherwise they'd have died out. But it can still be a relatively modern invention caused by achieving sentience and having recorded history, like anti-conceptional methods are for us. If you measure the evolution in millions of years, treecats having practised controlled population growth for 2000 years is nothing.

cthia wrote:Let me give you an idea of what a Terran cat is up against. Of course, a treecat and a Terran cat are not the same.

cthia wrote:Correct, which is why the comparison is meaningless. Maybe they compare more closely to dolphins.

Incest Not So Taboo in Nature
By Dave Mosher

First Published 12 years ago

This recent story went wide: British fraternal twins who were adopted separately at birth later married without realizing they were brother and sister. Why does this make us so instantly and overtly squeamish?

Lord David Alton of Liverpool — a member of British parliament — discussed the couple's case during a government session on in vitro fertilization as he pushed for identity rights of children conceived by the technique. On his Web site, Alton noted that a similar adopted brother-sister marriage was recently avoided through detailed identity records.

Incest is considered taboo in nearly every human culture around the world, researchers have found. Yet as the 21st century waxes, questions about the behavior remain unanswered.

Where does our aversion to incest come from — genetics or society — and what's so bad about it, anyway?

Incestuous ancestry

Scientists think Earth's earliest life emerged about 3.8 billion years ago and slowly evolved into the diversity of organisms seen today. Until roughly 1.2 billion years ago, however, sex didn't exist.

Nathaniel Wheelwright, an evolutionary biologist at Bowdoin College in Maine, said asexual reproduction was the first type of reproduction to evolve. In its most basic form, called parthenogenesis, it involves one-celled organisms such as bacteria dividing in two. But more complex creatures do it, too.

"Asexual reproduction is [like] the ultimate in incest because you're breeding with yourself," Wheelwright told LiveScience. "You can still see species asexually reproducing, or cloning themselves, in situations where there is no advantage to [sex]," he said, "and you can see species that commit incest where there is no penalty to inbreeding."

Aside from microbes, most of which reproduce asexually, Wheelwright said mountaintops, small islands and other isolated habitats are places where today's incestuous reproducers are most commonly found. "If your relatives are the only game in town you don't have much of a choice," he said.

But Wheelwright explained that sexual reproduction — the current reproductive norm among plants and animals — gives creatures a leg-up in life. "Sex results in ... diverse offspring and maintains a diversity of genes," he said.

It's like nature's way of avoiding putting all its eggs in one basket: Where one copy of a gene may spell doom for one organism, a different version spread through sex in another creature may help it survive.

"People who domesticated plants and animals were likely the first to figure this out," Wheelwright said. "When they inbred, they got lower birth weights, increased embryo death and decreased fertility."

Still, genetic diversity is at times less important than other advantages, such as better guarding of offspring in some African fish that inbreed. On the whole, however, the risk of incest in plants and animals generally outweighs any of its benefits.

Bad combination

The problem with incest is that it can keep so-called "bad" genes in the gene pool and compound their effects, said Debra Lieberman, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Hawaii.

"Close genetic relatives run the risk of having offspring that have a reduced chance of surviving," Lieberman said.

To understand the dangers of incest in humans, she explained, one needs to know that DNA — the blueprint of life — is divvied up into two sets of 23 chromosomes for a total of 46 in the average human being. One set of 23 comes from the father while the other comes from the mother.

While Lieberman cautioned it's never plain when it comes to genetics, she offered a simplified example to illustrate the risks associated with incest.

"Let's say you get a bad gene, which scientists call deleterious, from your mom. But your dad's copy of the same gene functions normally," Lieberman said. "The good version acts like a backup, effectively preventing disease the bad gene might have caused."

But having a kid with your sibling, she explained, drastically increases the chances of getting two copies of the deleterious gene as compared to reproducing with someone outside of your family.


"Each of you would have a copy of that bad gene, so there's a good chance your kid won't have a normal copy to work with," she said. Multiply that by any other deleterious genes sprinkled among an estimated 50,000 active genes in humans, she explained, and there are bound to be some life-shortening problems.

Naturally unselected

Because so-called higher organisms such as humans are susceptible to life-shortening genetic combinations, Lieberman thinks nature has weeded out incestuous behavior over time through natural selection. Humans and other animals, she said, likely evolved ways to detect and avoid mating with their close relatives.

"We don't have DNA goggles to detect our relatives, but I think we've evolved psychological systems that help us do so," Lieberman said, including face recognition and even scent. But Lieberman thinks the strongest cue humans have is growing up with a sibling under the same roof.


"People refer to this as the Westermarck Effect, which essentially says children who co-reside are much less likely to breed with each other when they reach adulthood," she said.

Even unrelated children who grow up together exhibit avoidance toward inbreeding, she said.

"The Kibbutz communities in Israel are a good example," she said. Only weeks after birth, mothers give their kids to a "children's society" staffed by trained caregivers. Lieberman said people raised in the same community are much less likely to marry each other than someone from a neighboring area.

Another example Lieberman noted are 1800s records of arranged Taiwanese "minor" marriages, where parents would arrange a marriage for their daughter by handing her over to the future groom's household shortly after birth.


"Compared to 'major' marriage arrangements, where a couple meets just before the wedding, minor couples had fewer kids," she told LiveScience. "Minor couples frequently refused to consummate their marriage, so the fathers would stand outside their door until they did."

Lieberman thinks minor couples had such trouble because they grew up with one another, "activating the genetic cues that screamed, 'Avoid mating with this person,'" she said. "Those cues probably didn't get activated with the brother-sister couple who married. They didn't grow up together."

Incestuous mysteries

Although no genes for incest avoidance cues have been pinpointed yet, Lieberman thinks they will eventually be tracked down.

"It would be wonderful to isolate those genes," she said. "I think we will some day, but we need to know if there are other cues used to avoid mating with a relative."

But how does Lieberman explain incestuous behavior both in captive and wild animals, such as juvenile male chimps who attempt sex with their mothers?

"These systems aren't foolproof," she said. "Sometimes the [female chimp mother] lets her male offspring mount her if they're frightened and want to calm down. But most of the time, females squawk and reject the attempts."

David Spain, an emeritus University of Washington anthropologist who has followed incest research since 1968, said incest "defeats the whole point of sex" — mixing up the gene pool — and is ultimately why the behavior is astonishingly rare among first relatives.

"Cousin marriages don't have as much in the way of deleterious effects, so we see those partnerships more often," Spain said. "Evolution weeds out the things that don't work."

Better birth certificates?

Spain thinks the now-unmarried twins, whose identities and anullment details have been concealed, would be fascinating to interview.

"This is definitely a one-in-a-million type thing. The psychoanalyst side of me definitely wants to know what was going through their minds after they discovered they were brother and sister," Spain said, noting that such an analysis might offer important scientific clues about incest.

Other than that, he said, the couple's story simply excites human aversion to incest. "Just look to popular culture to understand why," he said. "It's sort of like a 'Star Wars' story that ends up with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leah marrying each other."

Yet Dan Boucher, a spokesperson for Lord Alton, said the couple's tale might repeat itself as more people choose to conceive their children through sperm donors.

"A donor can be used to conceive up to 10 children," Boucher said, and according to Alton's Web site up to 25 children have been conceived from a single donor. "That greatly increases the chances of something like this happening again."

Offering two birth certificates to IVF children, he said, could help: One "long" version would indicate the genetic father as well as the mother, while a "short" version without such details could be used to maintain the person's privacy.

"I'm hoping this will become a law by the summer," Boucher said.

cthia wrote:Are treecats monogamous? Is there sex for pleasure? Do they practice birth control?

Treecats are a clan species. Are they inbreeding? Shouldn't they seek new genes outside their own Clan's genepool? Shouldn't affiliation with two-legs expose treecats to their expertise in medicine and study this for them? Alison, can you hear me? Their empathic powers could become even stronger if new blood is constantly cycled within the clan.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:Are treecats monogamous? Is there sex for pleasure? Do they practice birth control?

Yes. We don't know. We don't know (but I speculate they do).

Treecats are a clan species. Are they inbreeding? Shouldn't they seek new genes outside their own Clan's genepool? Shouldn't affiliation with two-legs expose treecats to their expertise in medicine and study this for them? Alison, can you hear me? Their empathic powers could become even stronger if new blood is constantly cycled within the clan.

They are intelligent enough to take up agriculture within one T-century of Sphinx being settled by humans. That's less than one treecat generation. An 18-cycles old (one hand of hands) treecat isn't even middle-aged. Half the population alive would still have lived when there weren't humans on the planet.

Maybe the cause-effect relationship in agriculture is more obvious then genetic damage. But one the Sphinx Forestry Service starts working with treecats, the SFS can help them practice good genetic diversity.

The clan members also seem to be numbered in the hundreds and we do hear a lot about exchange of members between clans, which is probably sufficient by itself.

cthia wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
The clan members also seem to be numbered in the hundreds and we do hear a lot about exchange of members between clans, which is probably sufficient by itself.

The minimum viable population (MVP) is 50/500 according to Wikipedia. But that number increases to thousands if there is inbreeding. Treecat clans have always seemed so small to me. I always think about some of the people I've interacted with in small, even somewhat, isolated cities. Let me tell you!