This week’s cover story of New York magazine is a practical guide to the world of polyamory, and offers answers to questions like: “Can I handle this?” “Should we tell our kids?” “How much time does this all take?” But there’s a key set of questions that readers will not find in the magazine’s pages, and it concerns the art that the magazine has chosen to illustrate the concept of having multiple partners: Why are there four cats with their arms around each other? Do cats, per the definition of polyamory, share romantic, intimate bonds with concurrent partners? What is up with the love lives of those mysterious creatures?
I come to you with answers: Not only is the positioning of the cats on the cover “staged and unnatural,” says cat expert Dennis Turner, so is its implication about cat lifestyles. Whether or not animals experience romantic love (a subject of much debate), many do form committed partnerships, mating year after year and co-parenting their young. But cats don’t fall into that camp. “Cats don’t have primary sex partners, they don’t form loving relationships, they’re not pair-bonding,” says Mikel Delgado, a scientist who studies cat behavior. Well!
Cats do have sex with multiple other cats. When an unspayed female cat is in heat, which happens for several days every couple of weeks during breeding season, males have been observed to gather and patiently wait in line for their turn to mate with the female. Interestingly, says veterinary behavior expert Carlo Siracusa, these male cats are from different social groups and would normally behave aggressively toward each other—but for the occasion of mating, they will peacefully congregate. (Perhaps this is vaguely reminiscent of the acquiescences that polyamorous couples need to make to respect each other’s desires, as discussed by writer Allison Davis in the magazine’s cover story.)
The female will then mate with multiple males over several days. It’s hard to know if animals enjoy sex (another subject of debate), but cat sex … doesn’t seem particularly pleasant. Female cats have been known to scream during copulation, perhaps because of pain from the male’s barbed (yes, barbed) penis. “It’s not, like, groovy,” Delgado says. Having a lot of sex with different partners ensures a few things. First, that the female will ovulate. Cats have something called “induced ovulation,” where mating triggers the ovary to release the egg—but sometimes it can take a few go-arounds for that to happen. And second, female cats can actually carry litters fathered by multiple males, so more partners means more chance of having a strong, healthy sire for at least some of the kittens.
But none of this really makes cats the poster children for polyamory. Ethical nonmonogamy might often be conflated with sexual freeness or promiscuity, but in reality, as New York magazine’s lengthy treatment of the subject explores, polyamorous relationships involve feelings, love, and conversations about expectations, rules, and jealousy. “When humans are talking about these relationships, there’s always a lot of talk about consent and ethics,” Delgado says. “And those are things that cats aren’t spending a lot of time thinking about, right? They’re focused on reproducing.”
Cats can be more social than we give them credit for, though. In feral colonies, female cats tend to band together to raise their kittens, while in households, some cats form friendships with each other, particularly if they’ve been fixed. By spaying and neutering our cats, “we’re taking away some of the behaviors that they would naturally exhibit that might prevent them from forming these relationships,” says Delgado. Still, many castrated household cats don’t like to share their space with others. The variability of cats’ social tendencies has a fancy name: “facultative sociality.”
So no, cats aren’t forming romantic, intimate, sexual bonds with a single partner, let alone multiple partners. (RIP Thomas O’Malley and Duchess from The Aristocats.) But the right four cats? They just might cuddle.
