A video of a cat family and their kittens got one viewer to declare “This is the sweetest thing I have seen on TikTok” and has been viewed 2.1 million times.
In the video a light gray tabby cat can be seen snuggling with a dark gray cat on a special cat bed, with their five dark gray tabby kittens also enjoying a nap. A painting of two adult cats wearing Elizabethan ruffs can be seen in the background.
Posted to the TikTok page @svs3gg (Mouxiaolin’s family), previous posts are all dedicated to the cat family, with 8.3 million likes across the whole page.
One user commented, “Happy families! I love when papa cat is so much a part of it.”
The presence of the father cat in this scenario is rare, as male cats rarely stay with the female and kittens. A study from 2016 published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology found that female cats can sense a difference in levels of urgency in their kittens’ calls. Researchers at the Hanover Medical School and the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, Germany have found that male cats do not adjust their response in a similar way.
The research found that female cats responded roughly ten percent faster to kitten calls that conveyed greater urgency than to kitten calls conveying less urgency. They believe that this indicated that female cats are able to evaluate the emotional content of kitten calls and react accordingly. Male cats did not show the same adjustment in reaction.
Cats Protection confirm the common rumor that cats can get pregnant by multiple male cats.
“There could even be as many fathers as there are kittens!” they say. “The ability to produce a litter of kittens fathered by more than one tom cat is called superfecundation. If we consider that the trait for boldness, or how friendly or outgoing the cat is, comes from the father, this helps to explain the differences seen in a single litter not only in the variety of coat color or length, but also the personality of the kittens.
“Overall, cats are not known for their fatherly skills as male cats do not tend to be involved in raising offspring, especially in the wild. Anecdotally, there are rare cases reported where domestic male cats have shown paternal care towards the young.”
