How can I persuade my brother to get his cat fixed?

[Bohandas]

Ok, I've found a source backing my previous assertion. According to [i]The Cat: A Complete Authoritative Compendium of Information About Domestic Cats" by Muriel Beadle page 117

"Jay Rosenblatt and Lester Aronson once compared the sexual behavior after castration of cats who had been allowed to mate freely and cats who had never associated with females. After castration cats in the second group showed no interest in sex but those in the first group continued for a period of weeks or months to approach females, mount, and even achieve intromission. Since they were producing no sex hormones, their behavior had to be the product of learning"

the primary source it cites is:

Rosenblaat, Jay S., and Aaronson, Lester R. (1958) "The Decline of Sexual Behavior of Male Cats After Castration." Behaviour 12:285

[Keltest]

Ok, I've found a source backing my previous assertion. According to [i]The Cat: A Complete Authoritative Compendium of Information About Domestic Cats" by Muriel Beadle page 117

"Jay Rosenblatt and Lester Aronson once compared the sexual behavior after castration of cats who had been allowed to mate freely and cats who had never associated with females. After castration cats in the second group showed no interest in sex but those in the first group continued for a period of weeks or months to approach females, mount, and even achieve intromission. Since they were producing no sex hormones, their behavior had to be the product of learning"

the primary source it cites is:

Rosenblaat, Jay S., and Aaronson, Lester R. (1958) "The Decline of Sexual Behavior of Male Cats After Castration." Behaviour 12:285

If they actually derived pleasure from it, don't you think they would keep doing it longer than a few weeks?

[Bohandas]

Unfortunately I no longer have the free subscriptions to online archives of science journals that I had back in college, otherwise I would look up the actual primary source. It is possible however that this represented the duration of he experiment, or that the cats didn't have the energy anymore. I'd have to read through the primary article to find out.

[Lord Joeltion]

Just throwing this out there, I don't think that calling an animal (opposed to a human) a rapist makes any sense. Humans are intelligent enough to be rapists. We don't know if any other animal is, or if they have moral agency in general.

And "castrate your cat because nature designed cat intercourse to be painful" also doesn't make much sense to me. The only way to obviate this problem would be to castrate all tomcats, fix all female cats, and let the cat species disappear.

While animals can't seriously be rapist (since there is a lot of cultural value inherent to the term) animals in heat do increase their agressive tendencies; specially when one of the partners isn't rightfully identified as "not interested" or as if it were from the opposite sex when they truly aren't. Pheromones sometimes crap on their sinapses, I guess. Btw, I do have gore-stories of animals in heat, worth of Silence of the Lambs. You really don't want to know about them.

Unfortunately I no longer have the free subscriptions to online archives of science journals that I had back in college, otherwise I would look up the actual primary source. It is possible however that this represented the duration of he experiment, or that the cats didn't have the energy anymore. I'd have to read through the primary article to find out.

AFIK, cat's mating season is regulated by female's pheromones. It's possible those who already mated once but were then castrated, had learned a reflex response, similar to Pablov's effect.

Fixed animals usually go through a "confused" period very similar to its puberty stage. But not all females become more manly nor the males turn around completely either. Sometimes it's specific to the animal and it's difficult to foresee the particular development. And that confusion is not just for fixed animals but also for those who kept all their natural responses to pheromone's and hormones. That misunderstanding between individuals lead to funny situations but sometimes it gets uglier for one of them.

---

Idk, Bohandas, for me it's ok if you are against messing around with an animal's innards. What I find odd is that you seem to advocate for a more "libertarian"* treatment of a species whose environment is entirely man-made. Cats, dogs, cattle; those are species we took away from their natural state and shaped them to suit our needs/convenience. Saying a person shouldn't further modify their biology is weird, because we already stripped them from their natural environment anyway. We can't release dogs/cat/cattle in the wild anymore. They won't become wolves once again. Their natural instincts can only lead to further destruction of themselves and their species because we humans already made a complete mess of them. They are, by definition, completely non-functional for the current environment they suit best (human-made). For me, it's too late to go back anymore. Maybe it's sad, but I think it's true. If only we could colonize Mars for the kittens...

*since you used "puritanism", I can't find a better term. I'm bad at terminology anyway.