I saw a show about feral cats on PBS once. They found this abandoned farm house that had been taken over by dozens of cats, all of them females. It had been previously believed that tomcats would kill male kittens if they had the chance, but this colony didn't have any tomcats around, and all of the kittens they checked were females as well as the adults. After watching the place for awhile, it was determined that, when a lady cat wanted to get bred, she would leave the premises for a few days and come back pregnant. As near as they could tell, the lady cats wouldn't allow their boyfriends anywhere the place, which led them to believe that the females were the ones that were killing off all the male kittens.
Some time previous to watching that show, we had a tomcat ourselves. We never got him fixed because, right about the time we should have, my hypothetical wife accidently ran him over with her car. His hindquarters were paralyzed, and the vet told us that the cat would either get better or he wouldn't, but there was nothing the vet could do for him. The cat eventually made a full recovery, but we were reluctant to cause him any more trauma, so we never did get him fixed. Scamp was an indoor/outdoor cat. I built him his own cathouse and we used to feed him outside, but he would come in and hang out with us most of the day. He was real good about asking to go out when he had to go potty, so we didn't provide him with an indoor litter box. Once in awhile he would go away for a day or two and come back all scratched up, but not often. He mostly stayed on the property and minded his own business.
Then one day this lady cat started hanging around. Scamp shared his cathouse and his food with her, but we started seeing less and less of him and more of the lady cat. Then the lady cat had kittens, all of them girls, and Scamp moved into the ruins of an old burned out barn across the road. Then the kittens grew up and had kittens of their own, all of them girls. We never let any of the females into our house, they just stayed outside and got wilder and wilder. The only one that would allow us to pet her was the original momma cat. After awhile it started smelling really bad around the house, so we decided that we had too many cats. We tried not feeding them, hoping they would just wander away, but that didn't happen. Finally we called the Humane Society, and this guy came out and loaned us a live trap, which we baited with ham. He took the momma cat the first day because she was the only one who could be caught by hand. We would call him whenever the trap had another cat in it, and he eventually took all the cats away.
He told us that we shouldn't feed our cats outside, because that's what happens when you do. We hadn't seen Scamp for awhile, so we thought we were all done with cats anyway but, as soon as the man took the last cat away, Scamp came back and re-occupied his cat house like nothing had ever happened. We fed him in our house after that, but he still went out to his cat house when we went to sleep or when nobody was going to be home. We had him for some years, until he got old and sick and we had him put down, but no more lady cats ever came around and drove him from his home again. Years later, when we saw that cat show on PBS, we concluded that was probably the reason all our semi-feral cats had been females. I wonder, though, if that's true, then where do male cats come from?
I saw on the TV news tonight that your man Bernie is still in the race. Some people think he should quit, but he refuses to do so. They said that Hillary appears to be the winner, but there are all those "super delegates" that can vote for anybody they want, so Bernie still has a fighting chance. I think the Republicans have super delegates too, but not as many of them, so they are not likely to turn the tables on Trump at their convention. I read something in the paper that quoted a poll which concluded that Trump and Hillary are the two least popular presidential candidates in a century or so. You know, this just might be the Year of the Libertarians. Anything can happen in this goofy election.
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