Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [62]
Cats, like women, should be respected as individuals rather than admired as decoration, but there’s no harm, given a choice, in taking up with a strikingly attractive specimen of either.
A long time ago, I drove across the United States with a Siamese cat and drew incredulous crowds in the small towns and crossroads where I stopped for gas; many gapers refused to believe it was a cat at all. No one would be surprised to see one now, but a certain suspicion persists. The Siamese is widely considered to be unfriendly, perhaps because of its voice, and neurotic, possibly insane; everyone has a tale of a mad Siamese.
The Siamese is different from other cats, or, since generalization is dangerous and some Siamese are dull as clay, most Siamese are different. More intense. They’re generally conceded to be highly intelligent, but many people do not feel intelligence is an advantage in a pet. It makes them uncomfortable. Not every Siamese is a genius, either. I had one once with the brains of a potted plant. Son of champions, he had trouble locating his breakfast dish every morning, and spent a lot of time sitting bolt upright in corners with his eyes crossed, apparently trying to remember his own name. In general, though, whatever we mean by intelligence in a cat, they do seem well endowed with it, and the French statesman Poincaré said his Siamese Gri-Gri was “as intelligent as any man.”
Properly treated, Siamese develop a deep, single-hearted devotion to their people and overreact to competition, absences, and infidelity like an adolescent in love. They need attention, and think nothing of pulling the books out of the bookcase and the pictures off the walls to get it. They demand notice in a raucous, echoing voice that many people and some other cats find alarming; the sound has been compared to that of a giant sea gull in distress. Taking on a Siamese is rather like getting married.
Show cats are rewarded for being “typey,” or slightly more like whatever they are than the next cat. The Siamese is supposed to be a long slender cat with a wedge-shaped head and a thin pointy tail, so the breeders keep working toward longer, slenderer cats with wedgier heads and thinner tails, and the results have come to look something like ferrets. The best Siamese in a cat show is one you could pull through a wedding ring; I’m sure they’re perfectly charming cats personally, but they don’t look very cozy. For those of us not planning on the show circuit, there’s a kind of Siamese underworld. The second- and third-class and no-class Siamese, found in disreputable places like casual classified ads and supermarket bulletin boards and small family catteries and even, if we’re a bit wary and inspect carefully, pet shops, are generally considered disreputable indeed. From the better breeders, they’re called “pet quality,” meaning they’re good enough for the likes of you and me but not something a breeder wants hanging around lowering the tone of the neighborhood. They’re less serpentine. Their heads are too wide, their eyes too round, and they harbor endearing small imperfections in their tailbones, the knobs and kinks all Siamese used to have. In fact, these rejects look much more like the pictures of the first nineteenth-century imports than any modern ribbon winner does. They may even, in middle age, develop a spreading belt line and a double chin, just like ordinary folk. I recommend them. They cost about as much as dinner for two, with wine, in a fairly good restaurant, and they last longer.
The beginnings of the Siamese are lost in the jungle, and we don’t even know for sure which