Inspired by this thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=177215,
I was wondering, how exactly does one ID the gender of the average cat. Most of the ones I’ve been around don’t exactly have conspicious gentalia(unlike, say, my dog, who’s equipment tended to hang down enough to easily tell), just a bunch of Fur. Is there anyway to find out other then feeling around down there?
Feeling about is the best way, unless you have either a hairless Rex cat, or have the time to observe their behavior.
In high school, one of our Zoology projects was the disection of a cat cadaver. When we got to the sex chapter, our job was to simply determine our cat’s sex. After digging in that area, we concluded it was a male simply because we saw no internal female organs. Our professor didn’t like our lack of “show-your-work”-edness, and proceeded to sort through our discard pile until he found our cat’s penis. Very easy to miss. :rolleyes:
Many a cat has been miss-named.
It’s easy to get the gender wrong in both very young and in adopted adults, whose their surgical background is unknown.
In babies, it’s very helpful to have enough kittens that you can compare the distance between the anus and ‘otherpart’, the females’ will be closer.
In adults (obviously you’re not looking at an intact male, eh?), it may be necessary to ‘un-cloak’ the penis, if one is present.
Refer to the circumcision thread for ideas on how to do that…
Suffice it to say, if it has a penis, it will poke out from the fuzzy lump when the outer edge of the fuzzy lump is gently pressed in towards the body, if no pointy pink thing pokes out, you’ve got a she.
If the cat is very fat, the penis may be hard to find, as I discovered when I took my 24-pound male cat to the vet with a urinary tract infection.
Our neutered adult male cat has a noticeable scrotum, he just doesn’t have anything to keep in it. He also has an obvious penile sheath, though I have never uncloaked his penis and I hope that I never have the need to do so.
Our spayed female cat WILL show you evidence that she’s female. She makes lewd suggestions to my husband all the time, the little hussy.
In very young kittens it’s hard to tell, but once you know what you’re looking at, it gets easier.
Better pictures:
And BTW, it wasn’t easy or pleasant to try to find them.
Putting “sex” and “kitten” into Google as keywords isn’t a good idea.