The Cat Fanciers’ Association (CFA) has been under pressure for decades to revise the breed standard i.e. the guidelines, for the flat-faced cat breeds namely the Exotic Shorthair, the Persian and the Himalayan. I hope that the pressure has been … Continue reading →
This is another interesting cat show photo from a different era. It shows a blue Persian cat of the traditional style (doll-face). His name is Patrick of Allington. Cat fanciers love their fancy names and rightly so. His attractive female … Continue reading →
This an image from times gone by. It is a photo of Mrs H. Cattermole, a cat show judge, judging Sealeigh Grey Knight. The cat looks like a moggie. She wears a white coat as if she is behind the … Continue reading →
Possibly the first cat show was held during the time of William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) at St. Giles’ Fair in Winchester, England in 1598. I had always believed that the first show was at Crystal … Continue reading →
Jemima Harrison is the founder of the Campaign for the Responsible Use of Flat-Faced Animals (CRUFFA). It started in December 2015 with the aim, as I understand it, of stopping the breeding of flat-faced companion animals. The two paradigms are … Continue reading →
“Breeding true” means that the offspring look like their parents. It is achieved by “line breeding” which is a form of inbreeding which ideally does not transfer undesirable traits together with those traits that the breeder wants such as the … Continue reading →
Some websites confidently state that the world’s oldest cat breed is the Egyptian Mau but I disagree with the authors of these websites. Before you decide the world’s oldest cat breed you have to decide what a ‘cat breed’ is. … Continue reading →
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 … Continue reading →
Historians at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) studied the inbred monarchs of England and Scotland from 990 to 1800. They were inbred because marriages at that time were unions of convenience both politically and strategically. The most inbred monarch … Continue reading →
The two reasons why domestic cats are selectively bred, primarily by cat breeders, is to create cats with a certain appearance and secondarily cats with a certain character. Selective breeding is the opposite to natural selection. Natural selection refers to … Continue reading →
