Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [69]
When the Siamese cat lies down heavily on your person, he is claiming your flesh as his personal property; when the Burmese does, he is warming his feet.
Bossy with other cats, they fret themselves unless clearly top cat, and may develop respiratory diseases if they don’t get their own way.
Recently they’ve started appearing on the market in a rainbow of colors, red, lilac, blue, cream, and so on, which is confusing since their brownness was the point of them to start with, and it’s odd to see their boxy little faces looking out from under cream-colored fur.
All American Burmese are descended from Wong Mau, who came from Burma and was taken up by a Dr. Joseph C. Thompson of San Francisco in 1930. With the help of the Siamese, Thompson established the breed. Wong Mau had powerful genes; Burmese are not Siamese at all.
If you want a cat on your lap and in your bed at all times, winter and summer, go Burmese. Don’t get two of them, though; they will ignore you and sleep with each other, because a cat’s normal temperature is around 101 degrees.
The Maine Coon Cat is a great big longhair. People love it. It would be dangerous to criticize it, and what is there to criticize?
They’re considered the indigenous American cat; since America’s history is so brief a hundred years makes an indigene. The notion of their part-raccoon heritage is charming, and if such a cross were possible I’d be first in line for a kit; but alas, it isn’t. The accepted theory is that they’re the result of plain shorthairs, brought from Europe by settlers, mixed with Persians or Angoras brought by seafarers, perhaps a Captain Coon, in the 1800s. I can’t quarrel with authority, but it seems odd that this doesn’t happen anymore. Cross a Persian and a house cat and you get a fluffy house cat. You get Sidney, round-eyed, lazy house cat. The first official Maine Coon, Captain Jenks of the Horse
Marines, surfaced in 1861, not giving the genes much time to change in response to the environment. Besides, why were they all outside in the environment, these sons and daughters of Persians and house cats?
A romantic but unofficial theory implicates the Norwegian Forest Cat, a similar creature domestic in Scandinavia for centuries, and just possibly left on our northern coast by Vikings long before Columbus. British experts sniff, and say the Coon is a recent and artificial breed, while the Norsk Skaukatt is ancient, pure, and natural, and not an ancestor because its back legs are longer, but it seems clear they’re jealous; no British cat has such panache.
Inspecting a generous sampling of both, and all unversed in anatomy as I am, I found them very hard to tell apart.
Along about the time of the Civil War and after it, Coon Cats grew in popularity, attracted national attention, and won ribbons in shows until the Persian invasion at the turn of the century, when people lost interest in the mere native. Because they faded from the show circuit, show people thought they had become extinct, but of course they were doing just fine back home.
In the late 1920s, the naturalist Henry Beston spent a year on Cape Cod, writing his classic book The Outermost House. “Twice during the winter,” he says, “I saw a wildcat of domestic stock hunting along the edge of the marsh, and marked how savagery had completely altered the creature’s gait, for it slunk along, belly close to the grass, like a panther. A large brown cat with long fur