Oriental Shorthair
The Oriental Shorter is a cat which is very much predisposed to looking like a vampire although there has to be extreme breeding to create those large, bat-like ears which in the over-bred Oriental Shorthair tend to stick out sideways looking as if they are bat wings.
You add to that the black coat and the canine teeth on the upper jaw which can be visible as they protrude underneath the upper lip and you have a vampire cat.
In addition, you can see that this particular cat has cross eyes or crossed eyes. The medical term is strabismus. It’s a term which describes misaligned eyes. Siamese cats are very much predisposed to it. The Oriental Shorthair is a cat breed in the Siamese cat family of breeds. It is no surprise, therefore, that this individual cat has strabismus.
Note the extremely long forelimbs. This is because the breeder is exaggerating the breed standard for this cat. It is another aspect of the cat’s anatomy which makes the animal looked unusual.
Breed standard
The breed standard starts off with the sentence: “The Ideal Oriental is a svelte cat with long, tapering lines, very lithe but muscular.”
The ears under the breed standard should be “strikingly large, pointed, wide at the base, continuing the lines of the wedge”. The “wedge” refers to the wedge-shaped head of most domestic cats.
So, the breeder has picked up on the “long tapering lines” in the breed standard and created a cat with long legs! Everything in this cat is long and thin including the tail which should be “long, thin at the base, and tapering to a fine point”.
Tuomas
In the caption to the photograph, I say that Tuomas Ikonen is the owner of this cat. He is an illustrator living in Finland. He in fact owns three cats of this cat breed according to the Metro online newspaper. He names them Hugo, Hannu and Toivo.
As you might imagine, they get a lot of attention. He says that he photographs them all the time or that is what must be happening because he also says that “my phone is filled with pictures of the cats which I share online”.
He loves cats and is a “cat person”. He likes the Siamese and Oriental breeds. Therefore, he likes slender looking cats because the modern Siamese is pretty much as slender as the Oriental Shorthair that you see in this picture but it depends upon the breeder as to how far they go. You will see much more normal looking Oriental Shorthair’s than this ‘vampire cat’ as I think it is an unkind but perhaps appropriate description.
He has an Instagram account for his cats with 20,000 followers. He also loves black cats. He added: “We have always been fascinated by black cats and their mysterious looks, especially oriental cats. Everything that makes a cat a cat, is being amped up to 11 in Orientals.”
Sounds
Another point about Oriental shorthair cat is that, like their Siamese cousins, their meow can sometimes sound like a kind of honk or to put it another way it is a noisy vocalisation very particular to this cat breed and to the Siamese. Quite demanding and not in any way timid sounding. Tuomas describes it as like an out-of-tune falsetto opera singer.
In terms of character, Toivo is not anything like a vampire. He is very calm and chilled out.
Below are some more pages on Orientals.
The meow translated into English
Infographic about the Oriental Shorthair
Brown Ticked Oriental Shorthair Kitten
Note: sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified.