A male or Tom cat will go off and have fun with the neighborhood female cats, and you never know if he will be seen again. A female cat will generally stay at home and have kittens. In this way she will have more incentive to catch a lot more mice. Years ago at one of the mills that I worked in, when we know the cats were catching a number of mice rather than just eating cat food that we gave them. We would give the cats saucers of milk, this was to help the cats deal with the toxins from eating mice.
Millers are generally independent thinkers and hate to be told what to do.
This book is a study of the popular culture in the 16th century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Story of a learned Miller and his disagreements with the Church, for which he was burned at the stake because he read books that he should not have read and developed ideas that he should not have told others about. His basic crime was literacy and thinking for himself. Using the records from the Inquisition trial of a miller the author has recreated the way an ordinary person attempted to respond to the confusing political, religious, and social issues of his time. He was a voracious reader, very curious, and he constructed a radical cosmology and dared to present it to the world.