Wichian Mat (Moon Diamond) Auspicious Cat | PoC.
This is a cross-post to promote a page (not a blog page) on the Wichian Mat which is the pointed good luck cat (auspicious cat). The cat brings good fortune provided the cat’s caretaker looks after him/her really well.
If you’d like read about this cat and the auspicious cats generally please click on the link at the top of this post. The Siamese magical cat from the Thai Treatise on Cats is interesting for students of the history of this most popular cat breed and those interested in cat history generally.
This is because the manuscript featuring this cat shows us a strong – what cat breeders call “semi-cobby” cat – and not the super-slender version that we see today which I have called the modern Siamese.
The interesting point is that breeders who dramatically altered the shape through long-term selective breeding over the last 50 years of the 20th century claim to have done this to ensure the American Siamese was true to its origins. This is incorrect.
It was done to make the Siamese more “elegant” in the eyes of the breeders but not necessarily in the eyes of all cat owners and Siamese cats aficionados.
I thought kinked tails added a certain charm to the natural beauty of the breed. As most people who buy pedigrees have no interest in showing their cats, I don’t think they would have been bothered by that feature either.
I see that TICA are promoting the traditional Siamese under the guise of the “Thai” cat. However as far as I can make out, the GCCF version of the Thai is a colour-pointed Korat.
The Siamese cat is a complete confusion. The Thai cat is a mistake just adding to the confusion. The poor public. You need a PhD to understand the Siamese.
You know how a defect can enhance beauty. That could apply here. The Mekong Bobtail breeders agree with me that the true Siamese could be a cat with a “defective tail”.
Perhaps “elegance” may have been part of their desire with the Siamese, but I’m convinced that snobbery in the cat-fancy also meant they wanted to distance the look of their cats from very similar moggies.
Ironically, most short-haired colourpoint moggies look more like the original Siamese than their modern counterpart 😉
Agreed. It is very ironic that pointed moggies in Thailand are more purebred than the purest of American purebred Siamese. The same goes for the Persian. Better still they should reintroduce the kinked tail. A lot of early Siamese had kinked tails. It is part of the cat.
http://cat-chitchat.pictures-of-cats.org/2012/05/siamese-cat-kinked-tail.html
https://pictures-of-cats.org/the-kinked-tails-of-siamese-cats.html
Very interesting articles Michael. I enjoy seeing old photos and illustrations showing how certain breeds used to look.
I agree that the current day Siamese is nothing like the original. My suspicion as to why the breeders drastically changed their appearance, was to make them substantially different from moggie lookalikes. (By the ’50s colourpoint was more widespread in the random breeding cat population of America and Europe.) This theory could also explain why the Persian now has a flat face and a coat which requires human assistance to keep it clean and tidy.
Sad to say, none of these “modifications” have in any way benefited the cats themselves.
Agreed, Michele. Breeders probably found the standard moggie shape too mundane. The Persian went round and flat and the Siamese went thin and elongated. They wanted “elegance”. I remember a breeder actual stating this. What they created was beyond elegance to rat-like.