What affects us affects cats
A woman in America, April Arguin, has created two new hairless breeds of cat by turning two existing breeds, the Bambino and the Sphynx into cats with no tail (bobtailed). They are hybrids. The Bambino is a dwarf hairless cat. She introduced the gene which removes the tail or shortens it to create the …
Comparing purebred and hybrid could apply to many species but I’ll use cats as an example. Purebred cats have a pedigree which means that the cat’s father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, great grandfather and great grandmother and so on are recorded. And breeders have to breed according to the breed standard and meet …
In relation to domestic cat body shape, cobby is the opposite to slender (‘oriental’ in the cat world). It describes a shape which is stocky, sturdy, rounded, short legged, short muzzle etc.. The best way to visualise a cobby cat body is to think the opposite of slender and ‘elegant’. I have a page …
There is so much that is crappy about this example of human behaviour in relation to pets. Bad breeding of both cats and dogs can produce some pretty distressing anatomical distortions. For cats Persians get the accolade: overshot jaws and bulging eyeballs. A nine-year-old bulldog, Zsa Zsa, shown below won this years World’s Ugliest …
These are mightily impressive cat ear furnishings. They are so long they form the shape of horns. It is looks a bit crazy but for cat breeders ear furnishings are ‘desirable’. For instance, below is a section of the breed standard for the American Curl. Note: the cat in the photo is not an …
Hybrid vigor (vigour) is also called heterosis. When you introduce fresh genes into a breeding program the offspring may benefit from hybrid vigor. The offspring are healthier and sometimes larger.
This is the first case I have read about in which a cat breeder has been banned by court order from breeding cats. It was not the act of breeding cats which resulted in the ban, it was the noise they created in the place where the breeder lived. The place is significant because …
It’s arrived at last; a crackdown on breeders who knowingly create kittens (and puppies) with cute appearances because they carry a genetic mutation but which also causes health problems in the cat or dog. There was a trend in the middle and late 20th century when cat breeders desperate to create new breeds latched …
