Cats

We had a kitten who got really fat really fast, so we quit feeding her, and she kept getting fatter.

The fatter she got, the more we tried everything to slim her down, in proper human dietary form. So she caught rats who were bigger than her and ate the entire things, and kept getting fatter.

Then one day, she seemed to have lost weight overnight, which should have been our first clue. But it wasn’t until days later that we heard the six kittens she quietly had in a hidden, remote part of the garage where she deposited her kittens, probably to keep us from putting them on a diet like hers.

Wow. Even with human intervention, a six month old kitten managed to have six kittens, so we did some simple math. Much to our surprise, if her kittens were as resourceful and prone to propagate the kitten race as she, and if this ability of kittens to have kittens within six months went on from generation to generation, our little kitten would have had 1.7 million descendants by the time she was 4 ½ years old (and had had just six kittens every six months):

1	1
2	6
3	36
4	216
5	1,296
6	7,776
7	46,656
8	279,936
9	1,679,616
10	10,077,696
11	60,466,176
12	362,797,056
13	2,176,782,336

You think that’s surprising? You ain’t seen nuttin honey. Such cats live 14 years, and if I told you the math for the average American 14 year old kitten, you’d wonder why cats aren’t hanging from the rafters, not to mention the trees:

1	1
2	6
3	36
4	216
5	1,296
6	7,776
7	46,656
8	279,936
9	1,679,616
10	10,077,696
11	60,466,176
12	362,797,056
13	2,176,782,336
14	13,060,694,016
15	78,364,164,096
16	470,184,984,576
17	2,821,109,907,456
18	16,926,659,444,736
19	101,559,956,668,416
20	609,359,740,010,496
21	3,656,158,440,062,980
22	21,936,950,640,377,900
23	131,621,703,842,267,000
24	789,730,223,053,603,000
25	4,738,381,338,321,620,000
26	28,430,288,029,929,700,000
27	170,581,728,179,578,000,000
28	1,023,490,369,077,470,000,000

You read that right. There’s no spreadsheet error here. If the viability of all six kittens born from all six kittens for the next 14 years or 28 birth cycles was anything close to the kitten we almost succeeded in starving to death, between 1994 and 2008, our little kitten would have had, not 2.2 billion (that would have happened by the time she was age 6 ½) , not 2.8 trillion (that would have happened by age 8 ½), not 3.7 quadrillion (that would have happened by age 10 ½), not 4.7 quadrillion (that would have happened by age 12 ½), but ONE QUINTILLION CAT DESCENDANTS.

And you wonder why the SPCA complains about your local dog catcher? There’s only one explanation for why cats (and dogs) haven’t over-run all our neighborhoods, and that’s the success of dog (and cat) catchers. Or perhaps there aren’t enough rats to go around and if our cat hadn’t made the lucky catch of several juicy rats, her claim to fame as the ancestor to a quintillion cats would have been cut off at the pass (or in the garage as the case may be).