Would it be possible to give birth to kittens?
NOT mating with a boycat, that would be silly! I mean, say, could you have kitten embryos implanted, and then give be pregnant with kittens and birth to them?
I would need nine because I want to beat Octomom.
Go for ten. Then all the local TV “news” shows can play off the “deca” meaning ten versus decadent wordplay. Nothing sells like a good sound bite.
I’ve wondered this about puppies before and I’m kinda relieved that someone else thought of it too. I’m sure my immune system would go nuts and reject them though.
HOw is tABby formED?
HoW gIrl get PReGnant with kiTTeh?
In all seriousness, no. Y’know how they’re planning on cloning a mammoth soon? No, really, they are! They’re choosing an elephant to host it, as elephants are the closest living relative to mammoths. When clones are made, they have to use a host of the same or very similar species to the fetus, or it just dies in there. We’re nowhere near close enough to cats for it to work.
I mean, think about it. Your antibodies would freak out and kill the kittens. The hormones would be all wrong, at the wrong times. The gestation time would be wrong. The poor kittens would probably be crushed by the force of your uterine contractions in labor. We’re just too physiologically different.
At last! Sooterkins are real!
The top part makes me think maybe there will be a real Jurassic Park one day. I want my own dinosuar. It’d be so cool to use it to terrorize others.
I pity the gal who’d breast feed those tiny little belt-sanders.
So, maybe you could give birth to a baboon or chimpanzee? Or we could use them to gestate our fetuses while we drink, smoke, and look good in bikinis? (I’m sure we’re not actually biologically close enough to do that.)
Among other problems, a cat has a different number of chromosomes than a human, which means that even if fertilization could occur, the chromosomal abnormality would be embryonic lethal.
The placentation type is not even the same as humans, I’d wonder how the uterus would react to a foreign zonary placenta (that actually, does not invade the uterus as much as a human placenta does). Not to mention the type of uterus humans have vs. cats is also different. I can see a zonary placenta fitting very well with the uterine horns cats have… but humans have a different uterus (less horns, more pear-shaped?). The “band” configuration of a zonary placenta would seem hard to work, even if they do get to attach, it may not offer as much nutrition as the tight overall, all around “fit” a queen’s uterine horn would offer.
Oh dear… That was geeky… and full of run-on sentence loveliness.
I teach preschool and I have heard kids say not only “My tummy is full of kittens” but also that boys can get pregnant from eating too much broccoli.
“Sooterkin” is so going to be the name of my next druid in WoW.
I think the OP was asking about implanting 100% kitty embryos and just gestating them in a human, not creating 50% kitty/50% human hybrid offspring. Regardless, a difference in chromosome number is not necessarily lethal to the embryo - horses and donkeys have a different number of chromosomes and they can make mules. The problem with have odd/mismatched chromosomes usually arises when the hybrid tries to mate - meiosis is disrupted and thus the hybrid is sterile.
Now, I think there would be other issues with trying to mate cats and humans (and even bigger problems with the gestation process!), but chromosome count may not be one of them.
Spoken like someone who has had a personal encounter with a cat’s tongue.
I’ve bottle fed kittens, and I really don’t think that they could manage a human nipple because of the size difference. They wouldn’t be able to properly latch on and apply pressure to the right spots in order for the milk to be released.
If you’re into the “birds are dinosaurs” theory then get a parrot. Trust me, they can be real terrors at times.
Actually, I’m pretty sure we are close enough… not that I’d want to find out. Although an ape mother carrying a human fetus would have to have a C-section.
IIRC Picket Fences had an episode where cows were being used as surrogate mothers for human babies.
This has got to be the strangest question ever asked on this board…and obviously, that says a lot!