Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [68]
Off the record, cat professionals warn against the taut and elegant Abyssinians. It’s their ceaseless busyness; it makes them hard to manage. They pull the stitches out of their incisions and unfasten their splints and bandages. They take the house apart piece by piece and leap easily onto the curtain rods. “It gave me a headache just watching them,” said an anonymous breeder. “Made me want to go and lie down.”
Going and lying down is what they don’t do. If part of the purpose of other cats is to teach us the blessing of peacefulness, the lesson of the Aby is industry.
A wide body of belief holds them to be the direct lineal descendants of the sacred kaffir cats of Egypt. One source says they were brought to England from Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, by returning British soldiers in the 1860s; another says firmly that they’re unknown in Abyssinia. The English writer Grace Tabor, who wrote a book about her Aby Amber, says the Phoenicians originally took them to Egypt.
Another writer plainly considers them non-domesticus and says, a bit dubiously, that they have been tamed in parts of Europe. They don’t look tamed.
The distinctive thing about the Abyssinian is its ticked fur. Each hair is ruddy brown or red (or, now, blue) for three quarters of its length, and then ticked at the end with a double or triple bar. The underparts are solid cream or tawny. The ears are tufty. Altogether the effect is far from domesticated, the kind of creature that, if you saw it in the woods, would make you hold your breath and inch forward, careful not to startle it, to get a closer look.
They’re generally considered to be the closest domestic cat (if you believe they’re domestic cats) to the authentic, ancient, wild original (if you believe there was once a single original). Tabor says they’ve been called water cats, and were used to catch fish back in the dawn of things. They’re strongly psychic, and see ghosts. Loving, rather timid, tirelessly curious, they have an uncontrollable passion for secrets, for the half hidden, the half closed, pocket-books, bureau drawers, briefcases, the insides of cupboards and refrigerators. Flinging things over their shoulders, they rummage with the anxious intensity of a man who has lost something small but priceless in the laundry basket. When you yell at an Abyssinian, it gives you a look of utter, astonished innocence: Abys cannot be blamed.
If you live in close quarters, an Aby will have to keep itself busy by dismantling them. Two Abys will make twice as much mess but entertain each other.
Remember you were warned. They’re happy cats, though. To have missed the joy is to have missed all.
Recently, a cattery in Michigan, looking for an Aby-pointed Siamese in the usual dissatisfied way of catteries, crossed a Siamese and an Abyssinian, bred one of the kittens back to the Siamese, and to their astonishment came up with spots. The spots run horizontally along the cat, not at all like the vertical pattern of interrupted tabby stripes. Much as I disapprove of this kind of tinkering, the Ocicats are dazzling to look at, with the alert, affectionate faces of anyone’s favorite puss and the wild spots of something that leaps for the jugular. They’re expensive, scarce, and as artificial as possible, but they’re certainly electrifying to see. In 1987, the Cat Fanciers’ Association recognized the Ocicat as a breed.
The friends of the brown Burmese insist that no one is more affectionate and loving than a Burmese, and it may be that they are right and I am wrong; stranger things have happened. My own feeling is that it’s a question of heat. Burmese are heat freaks. To the standard query “Hot enough for you?” the Burmese answer is no. Burma, if that’s really the country we’re dealing with here, is famous for its swampy warmth. If the air in your house rarely gets above eighty degrees, and