Pregnant Cat Mysteries

The ranch has a few cats that come and go from time to time. The ranch owner feeds them a little bit to get them to stick around and to hunt mice and whatnot around the ranch. So far, I have encountered 3 cats.

The first was a black cat. I have only seen this cat in passing.

The next is a cute little grey cat. This one is extremely friendly. In fact, it is the nicest cat I have ever met. It sticks close to the house and rarely goes away; when she does, it isn’t too far. Because of this cat’s friendliness, the ranch owner thinks it was a housecat that was abandoned here. Brooke and I speculate it was abandoned in a nearby park on the other side of the mountains.

After a few weeks of being here, we noticed the cat’s stomach got super big. We also noticed the cat seemed to have large nipples and was unusually affectionate for a cat. We thought these were signs that the cat was pregnant/in heat. Using google I learned cats show signs of pregnancy around 3 weeks. So I thought that was the case with this cat.

A few days later, I look at the cat and take this picture.

It looks like the cat is much skinnier.

I began to think the worst…

Maybe something happened…

So I started looking all over the area for hopefully living kittens, knowing that is probably not what I would find.

I figured the cat would likely have its kittens under the porch, so I tried to look under there. It was hard to see things, but I did stumble across something interesting. 

This spot is more or less where the ranch owner was standing when he shot the coyote. Here is the casing to the bullet he shot.

But I looked all around and didn’t find anything.

The next day, I saw the cat again and decided to give it another shot. I found an opening under the deck of the pool that showed some promise.

As I thought about it, the large openings could allow a coyote inside, so on second thought, I reconsidered if the cat would have kittens there, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to check. I glanced in, something caught my eye. I looked a little closer and saw a small furry body and blood. I worried. The cat was right next to me. In the dark of the porch, the fur the the dead animal inside looked the same as the cat. I grabbed a stick next to me and went into the hole. I was crouched as the opening wasn’t very large. Soon I saw that the animal's body was not a cat. It was a decapitated squirrel. So that was relief.

But it doesn’t really solve my mystery. Maybe the cat was never pregnant at all, maybe she was just bloated and in heat.