cat show

[calimac]

The best cats this year were the ocicats - lively and playful as well as beautiful - followed by the Maine coons and, perhaps surprisingly, the Cornish rexes. No Abyssinians this year, but there were Balinese (long-haired Siamese, we were told).

One of the ocicats, awarded a prize at the judging, immediately started to play with the ribbon hung from its cage; first time I'd seen a cat play with its own award.

We came home with another year's supply of peacock feathers for Maia.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Back when I paid attention to cat breeds, the long-haired Siamese were called Himalayans. I wonder what the difference is.

(It's amazing how many cat breed names come from older country names. We don't say Ethiopian, or Iranian, or Myanmarese, or Thai. . . .)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Balinese are by origin pure-bred Siamese, with longer hair arising from a mutation. As a result, they're slenderer and less puffy than Himalayans, which are cross-bred between Siamese and Persians. That I guess is why they're called Himalayan, since the Himalayas are about halfway between ...

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, okay, that makes sense of having different names, though it doesn't sound as if the breed has a damned thing to do with Bali.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Apparently not. But that wouldn't be a first: other new breeds have been named for some country vaguely in the vicinity of where the original breed came from. Somali and Tonkinese are also nonce names of this kind.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

It strikes me as goofy, but then I've always been a geography enthusiast and a bit of a pedant.