Two of Harvey’s Northern Cyprus rescue cats playing

This is a very brief video by Harvey from Northern Cyprus. It is a kind of snapshot. I asked him to send me some video material if he could because I like to see cats that live in countries other than the USA and UK.

Harvey writes this about the video:

[It is] an older video of two of my rescues Balkar and Feliz playing together and obviously very happy. The outstanding thing is to see that Balkar a nearly fully-grown male does not harm this small kitten in any way, whereas it is common knowledge that mature males can kill unrelated kittens. Perhaps that applies only to newborns but Feliz arrived when she was barely 6 weeks old and Balkar accepted her as family right away.

If there is one notable thing about the cats, for me (and I may have a distorted idea about Mediterranean cats), it is that they are typical of Southern European cats. They have what I call the Van pattern or a slight variation on it. This is an inverted “V” of usually tabby colour over the forehead, a mainly white body and a solid or tabby tail. Orange and black solid or tabby colours feature frequently where there are colour blobs in the mainly white coat.

The cats are usually quite slender by Northern European or America standards except for the deliberately super slender pedigree cats.

All these features are Mediterranean (warm climate) domestic cat evolutions over 10,000 years. That is the way I see it. The coat type is very far removed from the wildcat.

You’ll also see the classic tabby in Turkey. This is the cat that looks like the domestic cat’s wildcat ancestor.