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In 1903
Frances Simpson, an English cat breeder and judge, declared
there should be two separate breeds of Persian -- the longhair
and shorthair. At this same time in the United States,
there were several separate standards for Persian cats. Whatever
physical standards the Persian may meet, this aristocrat of
catdom is well known for its charisma and loyalty.
Top Cat
As the
Persian goes, so goes the cat fancy. There are stars and there
are superstars, trends and megatrends, plans and masterplans.
There are 40-some-odd breeds of cats, depending on who's counting,
and there are Persians. No offense meant, and none taken I
hope, by the faithful communicants in the other denominations
of the Feline Church of What's Happening Now; but when pushed-in-face
comes to shove, the Persian is the cat's meow and the cat's
pajamas, too -- the once and present and most likely future
pastor of the four-legged congregation in fur.
These
days the pastor, like the rest of the pedigreed assembly,
is living in somewhat reduced circumstances. Since 1990, when
the
Cat Fanciers'
Association (CFA) enrolled a record 84,729 new cats and kittens
(a record 60,661 of which were Persians), registration figures
have fallen like a barometer in Kansas when there's a twister
in the works. By 1997, after seven consecutive years of diminishing
returns, CFA's new registrations had dropped to 65,183, a free
fall of 23 percent. During those seven years of famine Persian
registrations fell even more freely -- to 39,119, a 36 percent
plunge. Not to put too blunt a point on things, but if pedigreed
cats were a money-market fund, you'd be wise to look for a different
broker.
Scenic Cruise
Admittedly
the Persian's stove-in face is not everyone's cup of tears.
Anybody who owns a Persian has probably been asked by some
comedic genius: "What happened to your cat's face? Did
it run into a wall?"
Sometimes
that comedic genius is a writer. About six months ago a British
newspaper article describing a lost Persian waiting to be
adopted from a cat shelter carried the following headline:
"All little ugly wants is a little love ... Snub-nosed
Persian cat needs a home." We do not agree with anyone
who says Persian cats are ugly, and despite the breed's present
reversal of fortune, let us not forget that three out of every
five cats registered these days are Persians. What's more,
this cat possess a grand, illustrious heritage.
Persian
cats are thought to have originated in Asia Minor. They first
appeared in Europe -- most likely in Italy -- early in the
17th century. Pietro della Valle (1586-1652), an Italian traveler
and author, is often credited with being the agent of their
importation. A well-schooled member of a noble family, della
Valle left Venice in June, 1614, on a pilgrimage that ultimately
lasted a dozen years. His travels were inspired, in the beginning
at least, by an unfortunate love affair.
What grand
times those must have been. When the lovelorn and the heartsick
go on a pilgrimage nowadays, they're most likely to travel
through an Internet chat room, a karaoke bar, the local Borders
or a Club Med cruise. Della Valle, for his part, went from
Venice to Constantinople, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus,
Aleppo and Baghdad. Thanks to the restorative properties of
travel, he was able to set aside his melancholy long enough
in Baghdad to marry a nice Syrian Christian named Maani,
who accompanied him on his further travels.
According
to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "It was probably
on account of his marriage that [della Valle] visited Persia,
for the parents of his wife had been robbed by Kurds. In 1618
he was hospitably received in Northern Persia by the Shah
Abbas the Great."
Acting
as the mediator between the shah and the Christians of Persia,
della Valle spent four years exploring that country. Then
he spent two years in India, finally returning to Italy in
1626 with his second wife, his first wife having died in 1621.
Della
Valle wrote 54 letters describing his adventures on the road.
They were published in three volumes between 1650 and 1653.
In one letter he rhapsodized over "a species of cats"
in the Persian province of Chorazan whose beauty consisted
"in the color of their hair, which is gray, soft as silk,
and so long that ... it forms ringlets in some parts, particularly
under the throat." Della Valle described these gray,
longhair cats as "very tame" and reported that the
Portuguese had brought them from Persia to India. He also
reported that he planned to bring home "four couple"
of these striking felines from Chorazan province.
If You've Seen One,
More than
a century after Persian cats were first seen in Europe, the
French naturalist Count de Buffon (1707-1778) observed that
Persians "have a perfect resemblance to the cat of the
Angora." Thus, de Buffon theorized, Persians and Angoras
"constitute but one race, whose beauty proceeds from
the particular influence of the climate" in their place
of origin.
While
de Buffon believed that climate had created "the most
beautiful and longest hair" on Persians and Angoras,
their coats probably resulted from a more elementary influence:
a recessive, mutation gene that was preserved among the cats
living in the confined mountain areas of Turkey and Persia.
By today's
standards, incidentally, the original Persian's coat was relatively
short and somewhat coarse. Indeed, the 17th and 18th century
Persian bears about as much resemblance to the late-20th-century
model as a crossbow does to an MX missile.
The English Patient
Pietro
della Valle was not the only traveler to return to Europe
with longhair cats from Persia and Turkey. Other tourists,
inspired by the popularity and beauty of these exotic creatures,
brought additional longhairs to France and, finally, to England,
where they were known as French cats until the middle
of the 19th century.
Despite
these differences the two types were bred together interchangeably,
and their offspring were catalogued and judged under the simple
descriptive designation longhairs. Gradually, however, the
Angora gave way to the Persian, as did the Russian longhair,
a cat that was seen for a time at early shows. By 1903, Frances
Simpson, an English cat breeder, author and judge, declared,
"There are two distinctive breeds, viz., the Long-haired
or Persian Cats, and Short-haired or English and Foreign Cats."
The Governing
Council of the Cat Fancy, organized in England in 1910, decided
that all cats with long hair -- be they Persians, Angoras,
Russians or all of the above combined -- should continue to
be called longhairs and that each longhair color should constitute
a separate breed.
Colors of the Wind
When the
cat fancy was getting a clawhold in the United States around
the turn of the century, Americans had been importing Persians
from England for several years. Nevertheless, until the early
1900s the Maine coon cat was the dominant longhair at shows
in this country. In 1903, the year that Frances Simpson wrote
Cats and All About Them, separate standards existed
in the United States for blue Persians, orange Persians (both
solid colored and tabby), creams (also know as fawns), orange-and-white
cats (longhair and shorthair) and white Persians, which were
judged in two classes -- one for blue-eyed-whites, the other
for golden-eyed whites. There were also separate standards
for shaded silvers, chinchillas and tortoiseshells. As in
England, Persian cats were registered as longhairs. This custom,
which still persists in England today, obtained in the United
States until the mid-1950s when Persian, which had
long been used as an informal designation, became the official
name of the breed, and all Persians were expected to conform
to the one standard.
Today,
the gray, longhair species that della Valle described 375
years ago has blossomed into a colorful array. Indeed, so
plentiful are the Persian colors that they have been sorted
into various color divisions: solid, silver-and-golden, shaded-and-smoke,
tabby, particolor, calico-and-bicolor, and Himalayan. (In
most associations the Himalayan is still considered a separate
breed rather than a variety of Persian. Himalayans, of course,
were created by crossing Persians with Siamese, and Persian
cats are still allowable and necessary outcrosses in Himalayan
breeding programs.)
The Mogfather
Although
the Persian looks like -- and is -- the aristocrat of the
cat fancy, the breed's quiet charms and devotion are its greatest
treasures. Few stories we have seen recently better illustrate
the Persian's capacity for companionship than the tales of
George A. Smallsreed Jr. and Marco Milano.
Smallsreed,
who died last May 16 at the age of 75, was a racetrack photographer.
His longtime companion, a male Persian cat named Whitey,
had died in 1991 in his 18th year. Smallsreed told friends
and relatives that when he died, he wanted his cremated remains
mixed with Whitey's, which he had saved. Their ashes, said
Smallsreed, should then be scattered at various harness tracks.
Unfortunately, a probate court prevented any items from being
removed from Smallsreed's house - including the vase with
Whitey's ashes in it on the mantlepiece. Therefore, until
his estate is settled, only Smallsreed's ashes can be scattered
at racetracks holding memorial services in his memory. Nevertheless,
a fellow photographer reserved some of Smallsreed's ashes
in 35-millimeter film canisters so that one day Smallsreed
and Whitey will be reunited.
Marco
Milano's story is somewhat less homespun than Smallsreed's,
though no less affecting. Milano, a Mafia member who fled
Italy for Canada to avoid the attentions of Italian police,
agreed in May 1997 after three years on the lam to give himself
up, providing be would be allowed to share his prison cell
with his Persian cat, Minu. Nicknamed The Mogfather
by one writer, Milano, then 36, voluntarily returned from
Montreal with Minu after obtaining a pledge from Italian authorities
that Minu would be allowed to stay with him at the Sicilian
prison where Milano will serve an eight-year sentence for
Mafia association.
The
Persian Building Code
Through
scores of generations of selective breeding, Persian cat fanciers
have honed, refined and polished their creations -- and challenged
the wisdom of nature along the way. For nature, it has been
said, would never have designed a cat that has to wear a bib
in the show hall -- and sometimes at home -- to keep itself
clean while it eats. Yet what is animal breeding about if
it isn't about pulling the wool over Mother Nature's eyes
on occasion? And no other cat breed does this with the mellow,
seductive, laid-back elan of the Persian. Everything about
the cat -- beginning with its long, stunningly foppish coat
-- flaunts a calculated triumph of the recessive over the
reasonable.
The Persian
sports a broad, massive, carved-out-of-stone head; small,
wide-set, almost invisible ears; big, poppy, drive-a-truck-between-'em
eyes; and a short, short, short snub nose -- so short
you often need a search warrant to find it. This arresting
head is connected by a size-19 neck (resembling a linebacker
on steroids) to a body that is cobby with a capital C, has
five-fathom depth throughout shoulders and chest, a hind end
like a quarterhorse, a tail short enough to be an afterthought
and legs like miniature redwoods. All of this substance is
wrapped in a stylish, superlong coat that manages to be dense
in texture and cloudlike in appearance at the same time. This
glorious coat features an immense ruff that continues in a
deep frill between the front legs, and pantaloons on the hind
legs that cede nothing to the most elaborate, falling-off-
the-butt hip-hop trousers.
Such a
coat is not without imperatives, however. The Persian's celestial
beauty must be maintained with the earthly toil of combing
and brushing on an almost daily basis. The Persian's face,
which is subject to staining and caking from inadequate tear
drainage, must also be washed virtually every day.
Persian
Personality Profile
Persians
are the most mellow, sedentary and equable cats ever created.
Sweet of expression and temperament, soft to the touch and
to the ear, they are the perfect companions for a quiet, rainy-afternoon
nap or a late-night curl-up by the fireplace with a book.
As one cat-show judge said to The Florida Times-Union
regarding Persians, "If you're a couch potato, they'll
lie on your lap all day."
Yet Persians
are not totally inert, nor completely incapable of mischief.
A Persian named Munchkin who lives in Northwich, England,
is suspected of summoning the police to his startled owner's
door. After the woman had convinced the police she hadn't
dialed the 999 emergency number, they were at a loss to determine
who had used her phone to dial the number and then whine into
the receiver. They got their breakthrough clue when they noticed
Munchkin sitting on a windowsill by the telephone. "Munchkin
must have sat on the telephone," said his owner, Linda
Seymour, 31, "and somehow [he] activated the hands-free
button and dialed the emergency number. The operator could
hear him crying and called the police.
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