Just curious (this is just out of curiosity, it’s not urgent or anything)…
If a cat goes into labor, has kittens, then comes out of labor, can it go back into labor later on if there are some kittens that didn’t come out of it the first time?
And if not, can a veterinarian induce labor after a cat has already been in labor?
If yes to either, are such capabilities common among all mammalian species?
If there are still kittens inside, labor never really “ended”. It got stalled, for a variety of reasons.
Once the process starts, it doesn’t (physiologically) ends until everything is out of the uterus. If there are still kittens (or pups, or calves, or lambs, etc.) in the uterus, and it stops (for any reason), this is not exactly “normal”.
In many cases where it got stalled, yes, a veterinarian is trained to deal with this, and either help reinduce labor with drugs, or do a c-section, or just pull the animal out (large animals).
Just like in human labor, in the other mammals labor has different stages, and labor can get stalled in different stages (but IIRC, usually in what would correspond to stage 2 in humans?). So the mom animal never got “out of labor”, she was just stalled in one stage and never finished it. So when the kitten (or pup, or lamb, calf, etc.) comes out, the mom is not necessarily going through all the stages of labor again, but finishing the stalled stage.
Not a cat owner, but one of my bitches always went through a protracted (3-4 hour) rest period halfway through whelping. She averaged 4-5 pups, and almost always the first three came right out, then the rest.
The first time we bundled her off to the vet after about two hours, she calmly resumed as soon as we arrived at the vets. (I do mean the moment we stepped throught he door, LOL!)
After that we just let her have a rest, some water and ice cream, and she was back off to the races later in the day. None of the pups ever showed signs of suffering from it.
I read that cats typically have a substantial pause during labor.
The books says that theories are that in case a predator eats the first batch, the second will survive, or maybe it’s just because the feline uterus is double-lobed. In any case, “don’t count your kittens until morning.”
I think Malleus, et al, got the main reason: the cat uterus is shaped like a “Y,” often called a “bi-horned” uterus. If there are two amniotic sacs, and only one breaks, then those kittens will be delivered. The other sac might break a day or two later, with subsequent delivery.
I don’t think the interval between the two deliveries would be very long, though. You aren’t talking weeks.
~VOW
There are recorded cases in humans where twins that are born with major pauses (like several hours) between them. Enough that they have different birthdays, and not just by a few minutes after midnight.
I believe in humans it is possible for twins or other multiples to be born days apart, which would seem to indicate 2 separate ‘labors’. Not sure about kitty.
The Y-shaped uterus is not unique to cats, and found in various animal species.
While in some species the fetuses may share some of the outside placental membranes/blood circulation with the littermates (cattle, for example), the amnionic sac (the innermost one) tends to be one per fetus. There are multiple kittens not because the egg split into two different fetuses, but simply because the queen released multiple eggs at the same time that were fertilized by sperm.