Live and learn

Just when I thought I had seen about everything there is to see in a cat's life, having had at least fifty (and I'm not exaggerating) cats under our care during past ten years, life granted me another surprise.

We have several adult female cats living in our garden. Two of them, both Siamese pure-breeds, who happen to be a mother and a daughter, had kittens almost at the same time. The older one had five pure Siamese kittens, while the younger one had four black kittens by unknown father as none of our male cats is black. Up to now the older female has been a perfect mother, she even talked to her kittens and watched them very carefully at all times, whereas the younger one was an eternal awkward teenager, staying far from her litter and returning mostly to feed them. All was clear and settled until at one point the roles inverted and amplified! The older one not only became grumpy and careless of her own children, she started to keep them harshly at distance in spite of visibly accumulated milk in her breasts. And then the younger cat-mother not only kindly accepted the abandoned kittens out of her own free will (as you probably know, you can't force anything upon cats, they just don't give a damn), but allowed the adopted children to take her breast-milk along with her own kittens. I am utterly amazed by this change. Nature has peculiar twists and turns sometimes.