An author’s note:

There’s a downright pathological anti-birth attitude prevalent in the United States. Women go on birth control as soon as they come of biological age to have babies and only come off it grudgingly to have one, or maybe two, children. Part of that is a reaction to welfare queens that breed on purpose to get more money, then ignore all of the children. But part of it is a cultural pressure to just…not have children. 

It extends to pets. There’s an enormous pressure to have animals fixed as soon as possible–before they enter their first heat for females, and as soon as the balls drop for males.*

I grew up on a farm. We had cats. Barn cats, garage cats, cats living up close to the house. The cats were a necessary working part of the farm–without them, more chicken feed and goat feed was eaten by rodents than the animals the feed was intended for. 

Cats breed almost as fast as rodents. One of our cats had three litters per year, like clockwork. January, April or May, then August or September. That particular cat was an utterly gorgeous, seal point Siamese. Half of her litters looked like her (and were given away as fast as they were ready to go), one would be either tuxedo or cow-print, and the rest would be jet black. My grandmother picked her up at a yard sale with her first litter from idiots that bought her to breed, but didn’t know that females bred early, and assumed that a mixed litter would devalue every following litter. I’m not sure if that was correct, but that wasn’t why Grandma wanted her. She was absolutely hell on wheels on rats, and we had a rat problem. She was the healthiest cat we ever had, mostly because she didn’t come from an inbred litter.  

Most of our cats, though, had about two litters per year, because their backgrounds were different. We picked them up as kittens from a neighbor who let her cats get really badly inbred. Most of them were mostly okay, but some of them had some serious health issues, from allergies to serious mental defects. 

It only takes about five generations–cat generations–to get to that point. 

And then, the litters get smaller…and then the kittens don’t survive more than a few weeks. 

Call it maybe ten, fifteen years before there’s no more kittens. 

This was in the back of my head when I wrote Heisenberg’s Point of Observation. One breeding pair of cats went into the shelter at the end of Cataclysm. Only one. Yes, other people took their pets down, but those pets had been fixed. And there were more important things to the people setting the shelters up than ensuring a healthy pet population: namely, ensuring a healthy human one. 

When Tom Beadle sent his cats down, all he was thinking of was saving his cats. And saving a pregnant woman. He wasn’t thinking any further than that. 

And within about twenty years–fifty, at most–the last cat would have died off. Because cat generations are on a shorter time-span than human. And because inbreeding hits them harder and faster, and kills the population off sooner. Thomas Sutton would have never seen a cat in person. Hell, he may have never seen an animal at all until he started working with the biologists working to feed everyone on a few protein sources. 

When I wrote those books, my knowledge of cat generations, of inbreeding, and how it affected cat populations was in the back of my mind. I assumed my knowledge was common knowledge. I didn’t realize it wasn’t until my readers complained in the reviews about the cats in the first book vanishing entirely in the second. 

Mea culpa.

*One of the things that strikes me as absolutely wrong on toast about the current push to let pre-pubescent children have puberty blockers and surgery to pretend they’re the opposite gender is this: we’re fixing them, like we do our pets. Children have no idea what they’re setting themselves up for, and have no idea about the long-term repercussions. Their brain development is not at the point where they see future repercussions as happening to them. They’re not capable of making that connection until they hit somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-five, when the last bit of brain development finalizes.