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1981
What a
seminal year was 1981. The black-footed ferret turned out
not to be extinct; a group of Chinese scientists cloned the
first fish, a golden carp; the IBM personal computer and the
artificial sweetener aspartame were introduced to American
culture; researchers determined that primates with testes
that are large relative their owner's size tend to be promiscuous;
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered
the AIDS virus; and a pair of stray, adolescent kittens with
peculiar-looking ears showed up on the front doorstep of Joe
and Grace Ruga's condominium in Lakewood, California.
Parenthetical Expressions
Grace
Ruga was 20 years old and seven months pregnant that day in
June when the wayfaring kittens arrived at her condo. One
was a black female with long hair. Her traveling companion,
a black-and-white with a somewhat shorter coat, was presumed
to be her litter sister. Ruga was not aware of the kittens'
presence until her husband, Joe, 24, who had discovered them
outside after arriving home from work, told her about the
youngsters and their unusual ears. Instead of standing upright
the ears on these kittens curled inward, inclining toward
each other like parentheses.
After
telling Grace about the kittens, Joe suggested that even though
they looked thin, it would not be a good idea to feed them.
Grace set out some food and milk anyway. Not surprisingly
the kittens were still there the next day, much like stray,
hungry kittens have hovered near the dwellings of people who
feed them since cats were first domesticated in Egypt 2,500
years ago. Once again Grace set out food for the kittens.
This time she talked to them a while and was able to pet them.
Before you could say, "I thought I asked you not to feed
those kittens," they had been invited inside.
A Shut-and-Open Case
Each night
for about a week the kittens visited the Rugas, always asking
to be let out after the evening's pleasantries had concluded.
One night as the Rugas were opening the door for the kittens,
an errant blast of wind snatched the door and slammed in on
the black-and-white kitten's head, injuring her severely.
No doubt confused, the kittens raced off and rebuffed the
Rugas' attempts to help them.
For the
next few days the kittens remained in the area, but would
not allow the Rugas to get too close; then, without preamble,
the black kitten appeared at the front door, asking to come
inside. When the door was opened, she marched over to Joe
Ruga and climbed onto his shoulder. She never asked to go
outside again. Considering her devotion to her black-and-white
sister, the Rugas concluded that the latter must have died.
They called their new cat Shulamith, a name they understood
to be a variation on a Hebrew word that meant "black
but comely."
Paternity Suits
Shulamith's
newfound devotion to condo and hearth must have suffered at
least one breach of security, for on December 12, 1981, she
delivered a litter of four kittens. Grace Ruga has written
that those kittens were a black and white, a brown tabby,
a lynx point and a solid black. Other observers have written
that the kittens' father was a local boulevardier named Mr.
Grey. Without going into enough genetic detail to bore
anyone, we will simply observe that if Mr. Grey was entirely
gray, not a gray tabby or a gray and white or a gray tabby
and white, he couldn't have been the father of the black-and-white
or the brown-tabby kitten or, most likely, of the lynx point
either. But what's a little dual or multiple paternity among
friends? The important fact about Shulamith's litter is this:
When the kittens were four days old, their ears began to mimic
their mothers' parenthetical bent.
Like 99.9-and-then-some
percent of the American population, Joe and Grace Ruga were
unschooled in the ways of the cat fancy. They assumed, therefore,
that curled ears were not unique to Shulamith, her offspring
or her recently departed sister. Indeed, Nature's fondness
for pranks being what it is, there probably had been other
cats with curled ears born at other times in the history of
the universe, but as of December 12, 1981, no one had recorded
their names, much less thought that this particular genetic
anomaly was the basis for launching a new breed of cat. After
studying a number of pedigreed cat books, however, and not
finding anything that resembled Shulamith and company, the
Rugas began entertaining those very thoughts. As Grace Ruga
later told the Los Angeles Times, "We wanted ordinary
people like ourselves to be able to have a cat like this and
show them."
Making Ends Meat
1983 turned
out to be another seminal year. The Apple corporation introduced
the mouse and pull-down menus to computing; the first successful
human-embryo transfers were performed; scientists working
with yeast created an artificial chromosome; and Nancy Kiester
saw her first curled-ear cats.
Kiester,
who owned a meat market, was one of the ordinary people whom
Grace Ruga wanted to empower vis-a-vis owning and showing
a curled-ear cat. One of Kiester's clients was Ruga's sister,
Esther Brimlow, of Orange, California. Ruga had sent Shulamith's
brown-tabby kitten, a longhair female named Mercedes,
to live with Brimlow. Kiester met Mercedes and her kittens
in June of 1983 while making a delivery to Brimlow's house.
"When
I chanced upon Mercedes with her litter," said Kiester,
"I was hooked." Two months later Brimlow gave Kiester
a pair of curl kittens: a longhair, brown-mackerel-tabby female,
which Kiester's children named Princess Leah, and her
shorthair, brown-spotted-tabby litter brother, whom the children
named, what else?, Master Luke.
If Nancy
Kiester had been hooked by curls when she first saw Mercedes,
by the time she got her kittens she "had gone cat crazy,"
she said. "What had been a flash of an idea had become
a steady, burning desire to see this new breed established."
Shortly
after she had gotten her kittens, Kiester, who had bred and
shown Australian shepherds for a time, read an article about
Scottish folds in the Orange County Register. If folds,
whose signature, downward-bending ears are the result of a
genetic mutation, had achieved pedigreed status, why couldn't
there be room in the cat fancy for another cat whose ears
are the product of a genetic misdial? She called Grace Ruga,
and they decided to put Shulamith and her grandchildren Luke
and Leah on exhibition at a cat show in Palm Springs, California,
on October 23. This would be the first show for all concerned.
No Purebreds Need Apply
The response
to the curled-ear cats' debut "was warm and wonderful,"
Kiester wrote the following year. "Since then Joe, Grace
and I have attended a number of shows; and with the help of
a very dear and knowledgeable breeder of Scottish folds, Jean
Grimm, we established a proposed breed standard (see sidebar)."
They also settled upon a name for this new breed — the
American curl.
Most significant
of all, they decided that the only allowable outcrosses for
curls would be nonpedigreed domestic cats that approximated
the curl's breed standard, which had been written with Shulamith
in mind. By eliminating pedigreed cats from participation
in this project the foremothers and fathers of the American
curl wisely maximized genetic diversity in their cats and
minimized the chances of perpetuating the sort of inherited
diseases that plague some existing breeds.
Despite
the "warm and wonderful" reception given curls at
shows, Kiester thought at first that it would be a cold day
in Southern California before they were accepted for championship
competition. She told the Portland Oregonian in September
1984 that acceptance by the Cat Fanciers' Association (CFA),
the largest of the many cat-registering bodies in North America,
was probably 10 years in the future. She was off by a year.
CFA recognized curls in 1993. Within six months of her prediction,
however, The International Cat Association (TICA) accepted
curls for registration, and in September 1985, TICA granted
curls championship status. Never before or since has a breed
of cat climbed the charts so quickly. Not quite five years
had elapsed between the birth of the first curl litter and
the breed's enshrinement as a pedigreed variety.
"I
think," enthused the late TICA judge Don Shaw at the
time, "that the American curl is the most exciting event
that has happened in the cat fancy in recent years."
For her
part, Grace Ruga saw a higher purpose in the curl's success.
"God created the cats," she declared. "We're
just the press agents for them."
The
Building Code
But for
its unique ears, there is no cat that more resembles the alley
cats and barn cats with whom we are so familiar than does
the American curl. And for good reason. Shulamith, the matriarch
of this breed, was a free-roaming, black longhair of mixed
and unknown heritage, and the pedigrees of all American curls
must lead to Shulamith. What's more, the persons who framed
the American curl breed standard decreed that only nonpedigreed
cats could be used in curl breeding programs -- a restriction
that will be phased out in 2010, after which only curls or
their straight-ear relatives may be used to perpetuate this
breed.
The American
curl has a rectangular body that is, ideally, one and one-half
times as long as the cat is tall at the shoulder. Not too
torqued and not too flabby, the curl should exhibit medium
depth of chest and flank. The curl's head, temperately longer
than it is wide, forms a modified wedge without flat planes.
The nose, too, is somewhat longer than it is wide; the eyes
are moderately large and walnut- shaped, oval on top, round
on the bottom, and set on a slight angle.
The curl's
ears, moderately large and set as much on the top as on the
side of the head, should exhibit no less than a 90-degree
arc of curl and no more than a 180-degree arc. The ear cartilage
is firm from the base of the ear to a distance of at least
1/3 of the ear's height. Wide and open at the base, the ears
should curve back in a smooth arc. The ear tips are rounded
and flexible.
Curls
are available with semilong or short hair. Longhair curls
have fine, silky, flat-lying coats with minimal undercoats.
The coat on a shorthair curl is also fine, silky and flat-lying.
Personality
Profile
American
curl fanciers report that curls are "very people oriented"
and that they "delight in bumping heads with their owners
or new human acquaintances." In addition, curls are intelligent,
even- tempered, adaptable cats that adjust diligently to "almost
any situation" and to other animals as well.
Traits
In its
February 10, 1990, edition Science News reported, "In
analyzing data on 81 [American curl] litters (383 kittens),
Roy Robinson of the St. Stephens Road Nursery in London, England,
has confirmed that the ear-curling gene is autosomal dominant.
That means any cat with even one copy of the gene will show
the trait."
Autosomal
indicates that the gene causing a cat's ears to curl is carried
on a nonsex chromosome. A sex chromosome, since you asked,
is one that is inherited differently in males and females
and "is the seat of factors governing the inheritance
of various sex- linked and sex-limited characters." Dominant
also means that if a cat with one copy of the curl gene (i.e.,
a cat that is said to be heterozygous for the curl trait)
is bred to a straight-ear cat, half the kittens, on average,
will have curled ears. If two heterozygous curls are bred
together, three-quarters of the kittens, again on average,
will have curled ears; and one of those three kittens will
be homozygous for curled ears (i.e., will possess two copies
for the curl gene). Homozygous curls, in addition to being
free of the skeletal deformities that bedevil homozygous Scottish
folds and the myriad of problems that afflict homozygous Manx,
will produce nothing but curled-ear kittens no matter what
the arrangement of the ears on the cats to whom they are bred.
When curls
are born, their ears are straight. Within two to 10 days the
ears of kittens that are going to curl begin to show that
inclination. As a kitten is maturing, its ears will gradually
curl and uncurl in varying degrees and are not permanently
set until the kitten is roughly 4 months of age.
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