Cat show judge mistakes ring-tailed lemur for domestic cat!

This is a story from the early days of the cat fancy when things were not quite so sophisticated. At the Crystal Palace cat show of 1900 the ‘Madagascar Cat’ was exhibited in the foreign class. I guess the ‘foreign class’ meant domestic cats from countries other than England. It means something different today: slender cats because cats from hot climates i.e. foreign lands, are more slender.

A show judge, Miss H Cochran, decided that she was looking at a cat when she was actually judging a ring-tailed lemur, a fruit-eating primate. They do look somewhat different to domestic cats 🙂 ! Below is a photograph of a ring-tailed lemur.

Ringtailed lemur
Ringtailed lemur. Image by Bart-ter-Haar from Pixabay
Two useful tags. Click either to see the articles: Toxic to cats | Dangers to cats
3-way hybrid: Maine Coon, American Curl and Siamese
People are interested in domestic cat hybrids because they look different. This cat is basically a Maine Coon with curled ...
Can tigers mate with lions, leopards and jaguars?
The best source for information of this kind is Sarah Hartwell's messybeast.com. She is quite clear on this. While lions, ...
Domestic cats can and do mate with many species of wild cat
Yes, domestic cats can and do mate (breed) with wildcats. There is a slight complication in answering the question to ...

The mistake was reported in the news media. Miss Cochran defended herself by simply saying: “A lemur is a lemur, but a Madagascar cat is a Madagascar cat”. Yes, I agree but you were judging a primate, an animal in the same order of species as monkeys.

It seems that in those days the attitude to the type of cat that was allowed to compete was much wider as a number of what appears to have been wild cat hybrids or hybrids from cross-species mattings such as a marten and cat were exhibited. This matting is impossible.

Perhaps this lack of fundamental knowledge opened the door to the farcical mistake made by Miss Cochrane. Crystal Palace was the venue for the first cat show in England in 1897. Crystal Palace was an amazing construction; a cast iron and plate glass structure.

My thanks to Sarah Hartwell and her website messybeast.com.

Please search using the search box at the top of the site. You are bound to find what you are looking for.

Useful tag. Click to see the articles: Cat behavior

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

follow it link and logo

Note: sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified.

I welcome and value comments. Please share your thoughts. All comments are currently unmoderated.

This blog is seen in 199 of the world's country's according to Google Analytics which is pretty much the entire world.

Scroll to Top