Mary, Mary, Quite all hairy...

I've come to believe in a newly developed method of cat reproduction. The years of spaying and neutering have taken its inevitable evolutionary toll, and now the cats have found a way around it.

The sneaky bastards have come up with a reproductive strategy that appears to be part dandelion and part Cousin Itt (but without the slick sportscar). You see, what we think of as "hair" (or, in some circles, "fur"), is not really hair at all. They are small seeds containing bits of genetic material.

Here's how this works: The feline leaves prodigious amounts of this stuff out in the world. Then, one way or another, it gathers together into a cat-nucleus (see photo). For some cats, it gathers because the people use a collection method to deliberately do so. This is often called "brushing," and was the procurement method used by this scientist for the sample below. Other cats simply deploy their seed willy-nilly, and it becomes gathered together by a device specially invented for that purpose, called the "vacuum cleaner." This is a mechanized, industrial strategy. A third method is to allow natural air movements to sort of allow the stuff to accumulate in corners, around vents, that sort of thing. I don't know that there's a lay person name for this technique.

In any case, the "hair" is now gathered together. In order to make it grow into a new crop of cats, all that is needed is an environmental supply of some kind of food, and small imitation mice. Soon enough, cats are everywhere. I've heard that if you plant the seeds next to Catnip, you get one of these.

This is the only explanation I can come up with for the whole idea of cat hair, at least as it pertains to my carpet.







(I will name it Steven.)