Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [64]
All real cats.
Breeding out to plain cats, known as European cats in Europe and American shorthairs in America, has produced some offbeat points like red and tabby, considered Siamese in England and Colorpoint Shorthairs in America. The English seem to go in for more vivid colors than the Americans, and in their pictures the English red points are a startlingly fiery red-orange and their blue points almost blue, rather than the dove color common here.
It seems to me there’s a temperamental difference between the male and female Siamese, rather like the difference I imagine between lion and lionness. The male is lordly and swaggering and pleased with himself, laid back in his lifestyle and grandly demanding in his affections; he strolls into a room and expects to be applauded, he stretches in the sun with admiration of his splendid self. When living at home with his own female, he takes a nobly tolerant interest in his kittens and an affectionate, if casual, pride in their accomplishments.
The females, like lionnesses, are busy and responsible and fussy, and behave like loving but competent secretaries constantly reminding you of appointments. Morgan cries to be let into my desk drawers to sort through my papers, and keeps a close eye on the other cats and their health and behavior, and rounds them up in time for meals. She wants me out of bed on the tick of seven and back in it again at eleven, and paces back and forth across my book muttering discontentedly if I linger. Corvo thinks I’m well enough the way I am; Morgan is half distracted trying to whip me into shape. She is, however, a tireless and conscientious nurse to ailing man or beast, and would have made a model mother.
Siamese are considered among the best warriors and ratters, and kill snakes too; it’s a pity more of them don’t have an outdoors. They suffer very much from boredom in small spaces. It isn’t a question of exercise, they always get plenty of that; they just long for the unexpected, the new, the odd encounter, the changing scene. Sameness gnaws at them.
Several sources claim that they don’t get along with other breeds. This libel probably arose from their jealous passion for their people; the Siamese may have his problems, but he’s no snob, as legions of half-breeds will testify. Indeed, the Siamese is a genetic factor in a whole swarm of breeding inventions: Balinese, Bombay, Colorpoint Shorthair, Havana Brown, Himalayan, Lilac Foreign Shorthair, Si-Rex, Manxamese, Oriental Shorthair, and Tonkinese. He enjoyed every minute of it.
Occasionally I see evidence in my two of a vague sense of kinship, and the younger will sometimes watch the older to see what he does so she can do it too, but they seem equally fond of the others.
The Siamese female goes into heat oftener and stays in it longer than anyone else, and makes an unendurable noise about it. Screaming, writhing, and prowling, she bellows with rage at the unarriving prince and wears herself down to the bone with exhaustion; neighbors, even quite distant neighbors, call the police. Her gestation period is longer than a house cat’s, and her litters smaller. The kittens are tiny, pure white, and look like larvae. Often their eyes are half open at birth, but in other ways they’re slow to develop and need a long childhood.
Siamese cats have been known to eat wool; I heard of one that ate a couch. One theory is that the lanolin in the wool reminds them of the scent around their mother’s nipples, and it seems reasonable to guess that the wool eaters left home too young.
In the dark, blue Siamese eyes burn red as rubies instead of green or gold.
I can’t leave the Siamese without considering that nameless breed of black cat usually associated with Siamese blood. It is not recognized. Officially, there is no such cat, and those of us who have known one, and we are surprisingly numerous, constitute an exclusive underground cat club, nameless