jujubee, it has been nearly 30 years since I lived and breathed animal gestation issues. She was the runt of the litter... she was small... she escaped for about eight hours... and her being ... um... promiscuous just hadn't crossed my mind. "Back in the day" it seems like we spayed at around 6 mos. We were headed out of town for 10 days the day after she escaped and I was just relieved she had turned back up and hadn't gotten hit by a car. Had I been hearing a howling tom I probably would have clued in.

She didn't really balloon and *look* pregnant until 2 weeks before she delivered. She was still at an age where she was growing rapidly so changes in size didn't necessarily send us any lightbulb moments. I knew exactly when it happened given that she had only been out once, and I remember calculating that she *could* go as early as within a week of our discovering her condition if she went early.

So... yes, we let her carry them to term. Had she had any distress we'd have taken her in. Afterwards we were concerned that she had a fourth kitten that she wasn't delivering, so we took her in and they determined that she wasn't.

Her delivery was actually very quick, and she was a good mama to those babies.

Again...I'm not advocating doing any of this on purpose. Just reporting our personal story. Perhaps it's the farm girl in me, but when your childhood was literally one delivery after another, when you bottle fed baby calves in your back yard and helped deliver calves by the headlights of a pickup night after night during calving season, when you spent hours on end plucking porcupine quills out of the mouths of dogs who had gotten into tussles with the wrong kind of wildlife, when you've assisted in the de-scenting of a set of baby skunk siblings (remember.... we're talking 35ish years ago and that it wasn't illegal and they'd have died, otherwise, because their mother had been hit by a car)... when those were the experiences of your own childhood and you have fond memories and the realization that you learned so, so, so much biology from the experience, I don't think it's crazy or heartless to wish for your children to have just a small taste of that.

As I mentioned, we had no trouble whatsoever giving the kittens away, and they were given to great homes. They are much, much loved... and interestingly, by people who weren't in the market for a cat until they saw these. My own background, living in a small farm town, was that kittens *were* easy to place. Very, very easy. People always wanted cats for their barns. My adult life isn't in that same extremely rural region... which is why I wasn't quite sure, initially, what we would do with them. Thankfully, within the week that they were born, they were spoken for.

And again... I don't recommend anyone doing this on *purpose* by letting an unaltered animal roam. I'm just sharing our experience. I *get* why people appreciate children getting to witness the circle of life beginning. I also know there can be overpopulation pitfalls... which is why, sadly, it's not advisable for people to willy-nilly let what happened with *our* cat be a way of life.