Good video of a female domestic cat in heat adopting lordosis position

Lordosis behaviour is described sensitively and respectfully 😎 by the Wikipedia authors as "the naturally occurring body posture for sexual receptivity to copulation". You can see the female raising her backside and placing her tail to one side to allow the male access for copulation.

Note about the video above. I would expect this to stop working but what will be left is a link to the Reddit.com website where you can see the video. Or it might just stop working! Sorry if that has happened but I don't control the video.

The Wikipedia authors are far more technical about the description. They say that "during lordosis, the spine curves dorsoventrally so that its apex points towards the abdomen"!

Lordosis behaviour happens when the queen (unsterilised female) is in heat otherwise known as oestrus which is spelt "estrus" in America.

It is also known as mammalian lordosis indicating that it is seen in different mammals such as hamsters, elephants and eastern grey squirrels.

It is a reflex action which is crucial to reproductive behaviour. The "lordosis reflex arc" is hardwired into the spinal cord at the level of the lumbar and sacral vertebrae. The action is moderated by the brain.

The female cries out for attention and this vocalisation is called caterwauling. My mind turns to cat breeders in keeping stud cats away from queens. And I can remember a complaint by a neighbour because the breeder's facilities were in a neighbourhood, an urban environment.

The complaint was about the noise from the breathing cats. As I recall they were Bengal cats.

The female is ready for copulation and fertilisation under the action of oestrogen in the hypothalamus resulting in an uninhibited lordosis reflex. Dramatic words.

Cruder words would be that female cats positions themselves in a way which makes it easier for male cats to have sex with them. Breeding cats are very good at procreation. Theoretically, and I stress theoretically, a single pair of breeding domestic cats could produce 65,536 cats in five years!

This assumes that all survive, and that males and females are born in equal numbers and that they all start breeding when they are a year old. Reality is different.

2 cats became 84 in 2 years (in 1 room). Image: Image: Feline Solutions Inc.

However, we do see some pretty sad pictures of goodwilled but misdirected cat hoarders allowing their cats to breed rapidly such as the 84-year-old lady living in one room with almost a hundred cats. All she had to do was sterilise the cats. She started with two, unfortunately a male and a female!

How many litters does a cat have in a year?

The answer depends upon whether we are talking about domestic or wild cats. And I don't think it is possible to produce a one size fits all answer to the question. In fact, you will see a variety of answers to this question on the Internet. My conclusion is that domestic cats have 2-3 litters per year. Wild cats in general have one litter per year. It is hard to find definitive answers with respect to the wild cat species because even the best reference work that I have doesn't provide answers sometimes on a species-by-species basis.

Image by David Mark from Pixabay.

However, the sand cat and the bobcat appear to produce 2 litters per year but this may not happen every year. In fact, a semi-tame bobcat in a zoo produced 2 litters but Mel and Fiona Sunquists, the authors of a great book on the wild cat species, Wild Cats of the World, said that this is probably unusual. This indicates to me that one litter per year is more normal for the American bobcat.

Theoretically domestic cats could have 5 litters per year but practically it is probably as stated above although Dr. Desmond Morris in his book CATWATCHING argues that they have 3 litters per year and if they have 14 kittens within those 3 litters then within 5 years, there could be more than 65,000 kittens!

You will see that there is a difference between the theoretical numbers and practical numbers.  Many kittens die, for example. And there are variables which influence the number of litters per year. For example, when a group of male lions take over a pride and they kill the cubs, the lionesses are brought into heat. They become receptive to mating. This artificially forces them to have a litter. 

But if their offspring become adults then usually they don't have another litter until their existing offspring have reached the age of 18 months. This would imply that they have one litter every 18 months if their cubs are not killed by incoming males in acts of infanticide.