That PBS show about cats that we saw must have been in the 80s or 90s because were still living at the old place. Did they even have the internet then? Anyway, I just checked with my hypothetical wife and she doesn't remember the show. She also doesn't remember that all our semi-feral cats were girls, so maybe I got this story mixed up with some other cat stories I have come across over the years. I seem to remember that it was a commonly held myth that any tomcat would kill any male kittens he could, but my hypothetical wife doesn't remember that either, and she grew up on a farm, so she ought to know. According to a National Geographic article that I read in this century, adult male lions will kill any lion cubs, male or female, that are around when they take over a new territory. It said that they do this so that the adult females will come into heat sooner.
Since cats are not monogamous, I don't know how a male cat could tell if a kitten was his or not. I mean, it's not like they have access to DNA testing or anything like that. They say that any mammal mother can tell her own offspring because her milk is in their system, and they can smell the difference between their own milk and somebody else's milk. We lived next to a sheep farm at the old place, and the farmer told me that a new mother sheep occasionally won't "own" her newborn lamb. When this happened, he would pen them both up together in close quarters and try to get the mother to nurse the lamb. Once that happened, the mother would "own" the lamb and he could release them both into the common pasture. Those cats we had would readily nurse each other's kitten's, and I have heard tell of dogs and cats "adopting" babies of different species, but dogs and cats have litters, while sheep commonly have only one or two lambs at a time. I have heard that mother alligators recognize their own offspring too, and they don't even produce milk. Maybe the mother alligator remembers where she laid her eggs and assumes that any baby alligators that hatch out of that clutch are hers.
Chickens, on the other hand, commonly set on eggs that have been laid by other chickens. We kept chickens for a few years at the old place, and those hens would lay their eggs just anywhere. They would routinely crowd in with another hen that had just laid an egg and lay theirs right next to her. Then they would walk away like they could care less what happened to their egg. I have been told that most chickens make no attempt to hatch the eggs that they lay but, once in awhile, an individual hen might become "broody". We had one like that who ended up trying to hatch over 30 eggs, but she only had one survivor who lasted a couple of days till it wandered into the dog pen and got eaten. Somebody at the paper mill told me that, if we wanted her to raise chicks, we should have only let her keep the first dozen eggs, and then penned her up so the other hens couldn't give her any more.
Then there's the ruffed grouse, known locally as the partridge. They must be closely related to chickens but, of course, they're wild. The daddy partridge sits on a log and beats his wings, which make a sound like somebody trying to start an old single cylinder tractor that keeps dying out. This practice is called "drumming", and it attracts females who want to make baby partridges. They visit their boyfriends once a day, then go home and lay a single egg. When they have a dozen or so eggs accumulated, they stay home and sit on them, and they will all hatch on the same day. I have personally seen partridges in the woods with an entourage of two or three dozen chicks, and I have been told that it is not unusual, when two partridge families meet, for all the chicks from one mother to leave her an follow the other mother, usually the older one. Partridge families, of whatever size, will stay together until the following spring, when they disperse to start families of their own. Most of them don't live that long, however. Under ideal conditions, about 25% of the partridge babies live long enough to make babies of their own.
Our current presidential primaries are kind of like that. We started out with a couple dozen candidates, and now we're down to three, only one of which will survive the campaign and become president. Partridge hunters are advised that they can safely take about half of the partridges on their property in the fall because half of them won't make it through the winter anyway. We are not allowed to harvest surplus politicians like that, even though they are certainly not an endangered species. Just as well, though, I imagine they must be really hard to clean.
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