When do cats become sexually mature?

This occurs when they are nearly a year old, but there is a great deal of variation. For toms, the youngest recorded age for sexual maturity is six months, but this is abnormal. Eight months is also rather precocious, and the typical male does not become sexually active until he is between eleven and twelve months of age. For toms living rough, it may be considerably longer – more like fifteen to eighteen months, probably because they are given less chance in the competition with older males. For females, the period can be relatively short, six to eight months being usual, but very young females only three to five months old have been known to come into sexual condition. This early start seems to be caused by the unnatural circumstances of domestication. For a wild cat, ten months is more usual. The European Wild Cat, for instance, starts its breeding season in March. There is a gestation period of sixty-three days and then the kittens appear in May.

By late autumn they strike off on their own and, if they survive the winter, they will themselves start to breed the following March when they are about ten months old, producing their own litters when they are a year old. For these wild cats there is only one season a year, so young toms may have to be patient and wait for the following season before they go into action. This wild cycle is obviously geared to the changing seasons and the varying food supply, but for the pampered pet there are no such problems. With its hunting ears finely tuned to the metallic sound of a can-opener and with the central-heating humming gently in the background, the luxuriating house cat has little to fear from the annual cycle of nature. As a result, its breeding sequences are less rigid than its wild counterpart. It may breed as early as the second half of January, producing a litter by the beginning of April.

Two months later, with its kittens weaned and despatched to new homes, it may well start off again with another breeding sequence, producing a second litter in the late summer. With this loss of a simple annual rhythm, there is a whole scatter of ages among young domestic cats, leading to the variations in the stages at which they become sexually active. Cases have been reported of wild cats producing a second litter in August, but it is suspected that this only occurs where there has been interbreeding between the wild animals and feral domestic cats.