Cat drooling with delight is rooted in newborn experiences

Cat drooling is often associated with ill health of some sort. The classic reason is mouth disease due to rotten teeth and inflamed and infected gums - please see cat drooling for full details.

But ill health is not always the reason. Sometimes, the reason is because the cat caretaker is petting their cat. Personally, I have never seen this so it is obviously dependent on the individual cat.

Photo: by emilybean (Flickr)

Petting often takes the form of stroking. When we stroke our cat, it is the equivalent of a mother cat licking her kitten. The argument goes that our cats are kept in a perpetual state of kittenhood by us and we are their surrogate mother.  That is the normal arrangement.

Reason for drooling with delight!

In my opinion, cats might drool when being stroked by us because they link the act of stroking (licking) to the time when they were at their mother's nipple being nursed. At this time the mother and kitten purr to communicate with each other. The kitten is saying, "I am receiving milk". The mother's response it an acknowledgment.

The mother licks her kittens at this time. She certainly licks the bottom of her kittens to stimulate defecation.

When a kitten is feeding on their mother's milk, they will produce saliva to digest the milk. If there is a connection between feeding at their mother's nipple and being stroked then it is plausible to suggest that as domestic cats are kept in a mental state of kittenhood, they will salivate when stroked if so inclined. Although this is not common feline behavior. It must depend on the personal early experiences and character of the individual cat.

Some cats salivate so much (hypersalivate) that the cat caretaker has to keep a cloth handy!

Oral health

If my cat drooled when being petted, I would be relaxed about it but I would also just check to see that his or her mouth was in good health. A routine check of a cat's mouth is easy to do. Just have a peep when they yawn or call out. It is useful to keep an eye the health of a cat's teeth. Poor oral health is a huge problem in elderly domestic cats because of neglect to be honest. 

This is not meant to be a criticism. It is easy to overlook a domestic cats oral health. I am referring to gum disease primarily. The link below takes you to more on the topic.

RELATED: We need to formulate a method to prevent poor feline oral health.



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19-month-old sibling cats breastfeeding on their dog mother

19-month-old cats breast feeding on a dog. Screenshot.

A strange video of a couple of adult cat siblings at 19-months-of-age breastfeeding on a dog who looks very gentle and accommodating. They were probably raised by the dog when newborns as the mother was unavailable for whatever reason. But I find it difficult to understand why the owner does not gently discourage it and ensure that they are fed good quality cat food. I am not sure that it is good for the cats to drink milk as adults. It implies that they don't want to become independent. It is an extended kittenhood. It is ironic because when they stop suckling at the 'mother's' breast they will become kittens to their human companion. The human will become the mother. Confusing for the cats! Not really because it is all instinctive.

The normal aspect of this video is that it is very common to see dogs raise cats and vice versa. It happens all the time with great success.  Kittens become independent at around 12 weeks old normally.

Note: This is a video from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.

The reason why newborn kittens don't squabble over nipples

The picture is from Wikipedia Commons. The mother is Sugar. She gave birth behind the TV as it was warm. Her kittens were named: Channel 3, Channel 5, Cable 8, Circuit Overload!

Newborn kittens do not squabble over their mother's nipples because each one is labelled distinctly by subtle differences in smell. As Desmond Morris says, each nipple is labelled as if they were school lockers. I think it's a wonderful analogy. It highlights both the sophistication of the domestic cat and the wonderful sense of smell with which they are born. If you remove the distinguishing fragrance of a mothering cat's nipples, the kittens become disorientated and confused and start squabbling. Nature found a beautiful way to allow the domestic cat family to live in harmony from the get go. I love the thought of that.

Cat Trivia: Domestic Cat Milk Contains Eight Times More Protein Than Human Milk

Domestic cat milk contains eight times more protein than human milk and three times as much fat. Did you know that? I think is an interesting bit of domestic cat trivia as I've called it. I also think it's pretty impressive.

Kittens grow rapidly (hardly surprising feeding on that kind of milk) as their mother uses her body reserves to produce milk. In one study it was found that mothers lost about 5.7 g per day when lactating. Kittens from larger litters are smaller and put on weight more slowly than kittens from smaller litters.

Female cat can give birth to between one and ten kittens. The average litter is about four or five kittens.

The largest litter ever recorded was 13 kittens. Each kitten weighs about 3% of their mother's body weight at birth or around 90 to 110 grams.

Source: Wild Cats of the World pages 108 and 109. Get this book.

Why does my cat knead my legs?

 This question has been asked 1 million times on the Internet and there are 2 million answers! Therefore, I will not go into this at length. When the cat kneads your legs he or she is doing what she did when she was a kitten at her mother's nipple drinking her mother's milk. In order to make sure the milk flowed the kitten would knead the area around the nipple.

So this behaviour is the behaviour of a kitten in relation to her mother. We conclude therefore that a person's adult cat has a relationship with her human caretaker that is of a kitten to a mother cat. And when the adult cat kneads the person it is a reflex action that takes place automatically because at that particular moment the kitten is physically in a very similar position in relation to the person that she was in when she was suckling at her mother's breast.

You could say that the cat is confused or you could just say that it is something akin to what we do as humans when we seek comfort in the actions that we make such as lining up a cigarette when talking to somebody or grabbing a glass and sipping wine when we are at a party or biting our nails or doing any other of the things that make us feel more comfortable.

I think the important thing is this that the person at the receiving end must and I stress must totally accepted it because to reject it may damage the bond between cat and person as it would seem to be a rejection by the mother cat of her kitten.