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If
You Knew Susie
William
Ross and his wife, Mary, were cat fanciers. They owned a sealpoint
Siamese female, and although they did not attend shows, they
bred and sold an occasional litter of Siamese kittens. When
Ross told his wife about the unusual cat he had seen in their
neighbors' yard, Mary was intrigued. Within days, no doubt
at some urging from Mary, William paid a visit to the neighbors,
whose name was McCrae. They were unable to provide details
about the cat's origin, but they promised that if she ever
had fold-eared kittens of her own, they would give one to
the Rosses.
"I don't
have any idea how those people came to own the cat," said
Mary Ross from a retirement home in Scotland a quarter of
a century later. "We gave her the name Susie. Nobody ever
knew her mother, nor the father, nor whether they had folded
ears or straight ears."
...
Then Fold Again
About
a year after William Ross had visited the McCraes, Susie took
up with a local tom and had a litter of two, a male and a
female. Both developed folded ears. The McCraes gave the male
to some friends, who had him neutered and kept him as a pet.
They gave the female to William and Mary Ross. She had a short,
snow-white coat like her mother's. The Rosses named her Snooks.
Three
months later Susie was killed by an automobile on the road
in front of her home. "Fortunately," said Mary Ross, "Snooks
was a good and prolific mother," and when some of her kittens
developed folded ears, the Rosses decided to do what they
could to promote and perpetuate fold-eared cats. They acquired
a white British shorthair female named Lady May to breed to
one of Snooks' sons. They also registered a cattery name,
Denisla (den-EYE-la), with the Governing Council of the Cat
Fancy (GCCF) in Great Britain. William Ross then began to
visit cat shows to see if anyone might be interested in cats
with folded ears. A judge at one of the shows told him to
contact Pat Turner, a Londoner with a degree from the Royal
College of Art, unstinting energy and an unyielding interest
in cat breeding and genetics. "The Rosses wrote to me early
in 1967," Turner recalled. "At that stage they still referred
to their cats as lop-eared, after the lop-eared rabbits.
I visited them to check their cats and to bring one home with
me for test mating."
Seventy-Six
Kittens Later
Turner
went home from her visit to the Rosses with a one-year-old,
white, fold-eared male named Snowdrift, whom she sneaked onto
the train on which she was traveling. Snowdrift was bred to
a number of British shorthair females. Breeding the offspring
from those unions to one another and sometimes back to Snowdrift,
Turner produced 76 kittens during the next three years. Forty-two
had folded ears and 34 had straight ears.
Turner
and Peter Dyte, a British geneticist with whom she conferred
about her work, agreed that the gene mutation responsible
for folded ears is a simple dominant. If a kitten inherits
one gene for folded ears and one gene for straight ears, that
kitten will have folded ears. Cats that possess one gene for
folded ears and another for straight ears are said to be heterozygous
for folded ears. When a heterozygous fold is bred to a straight-eared
cat, half their kittens, on average, will have folded ears.
Cats that
are homozygous for folded ears (i.e., have two fold-eared
genes) will produce nothing but fold-eared kittens. The only
way to produce a homozygous fold is by breeding one fold-eared
cat to another, but this breeding strategy is not recommended
because homozygous folds invariably develop mild to serious
skeletal abnormalities in the hindquarters and tail.
As the
Rosses had discovered already, Turner and Dyte learned that
folds' ears look normal, that is, pasted flat to the head,
at birth. After 15 to 25 days, when the cartilage in normal
kittens' ears is beginning to harden, causing them to stand
upright, folds' ears begin developing the crimp that produces
their distinctive signature.
Another
Discovery
Turner
also learned that even though Snooks had short hair, she was
carrying a longhair gene because several of her kittens had
long hair, and longhaired kittens must inherit a gene for
long hair from each of their parents. Some of the British
shorthairs to whom Snooks was bred also carried a longhair
gene, the result of GCCF's allowing breeders to cross their
British shorthairs to Persians.
Despite
the presence of longhaired kittens in Scottish fold litters,
fold breeders sought recognition for shorthaired folds only
because they anticipated some trouble gaining recognition
for their singular-looking cats. "I advised the Rosses not
to breed longhairs," said Turner, "because those that I saw
had such small, tightly folded ears they looked as if they
hadn't any ears at all. I thought that would only make things
worse. In retrospect I'm sorry I advised that. The longhairs
I've seen have been just lovely. It's so nice to see a longhaired
cat that hasn't got a piggy face, and the other thing I like
is that the longhairs don't have the great woolliness of undercoat
you see on Persians."
Out
and About
Turner
exhibited Snowdrift, who was still owned by the Rosses, in
classes for nonpedigreed cats at several GCCF shows. "He was
even featured on British television," she said, "and made
news stories all over the world." Finally, Turner renamed
the breed, persuading the Rosses to call their cats folds
instead of lops because the cats' ears were not altogether
similar to rabbits'.
The revolutions
that enlivened music, hair and life styles in Great Britain
during the 1960s did not extend to the cat fancy, and most
British shorthair breeders were not pleased to see "their"
breed used to establish the Scottish fold. "People wrote all
kinds of nasty articles when we first had these cats," said
Mary Ross, who moved to a retirement home after William had
died in 1982. "They said we were breeding deformed cats on
purpose. They accused us of breeding just for the money, but
we never had any profit from the cats. We were out of pocket,
actually. We used our savings to keep the cats in good condition.
At one point, someone even sent the health and welfare inspectors
to our house. That's just how people are, you know."
Get
Off My Cloud
Opponents
of fold-eared cats eventually prevailed with the GCCF, which
announced in Fur & Feather magazine that "no applications
for registration or show entries may be accepted for the Lop
Eared cats." The reason for banishing folds, said GCCF, was
their ear configuration, which "will almost certainly lead
to an increased incidence of ear disease on account of the
poor natural ventilation of the ear canal and difficulty in
cleaning and applying any medication."
In reality
folds are no more prone to ear disease than are any other
breeds, nor are their ears more difficult to clean or to medicate.
Also erroneous was the charge that folds are prone to deafness.
There were several deaf folds among the earliest members of
the fold congregation, but their deafness resulted from their
being blue-eyed whites, which are subject to deafness no matter
what the drift of their ears.
The
Expatriate Game
Not long
before folds were banned in Britain, Turner required a series
of orthopedic operations and was obliged to stop breeding
cats. She placed most of her folds with people in England,
but she arranged to have three folds shipped to Neil Todd,
Ph.D., a geneticist in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Todd had
learned about folds in an article that Turner and Dyte had
published in the Carnivore Genetics Newsletter, which
Todd edited. He wanted the folds because he was studying the
effects of several mutations in cats.
According
to C. William Nixon, Ph.D., an associate of Todd and himself
a specialist in genetics, the first litter of Scottish folds
born in this country arrived on November 30, 1971. There were
two kittens in the litter. Both developed folded ears. The
parents of these kittens produced a second litter the following
November, and several other litters were born at Todd's.
Before
long Todd lost interest in his fold research. One of his cats,
a fold-eared female named Hester, went to Salle Wolfe Peters,
a Manx breeder in southeastern Pennsylvania. Peters had begun
looking for a fold-eared cat after seeing an article about
folds in the 1971 Cat Fanciers' Association Yearbook.
Shortly after acquiring Hester, Peters imported two folds
from Europe, both of them males.
Peters
was an enthusiastic friend of the Scottish fold, and her zeal
for the breed inspired a tiny coterie of disciples to spread
the word about these cats. As a result of their efforts, folds
were accepted for registration in 1973-74 by several North
American cat registries; and on May 1, 1978, folds became
eligible for championship competition in the Cat Fanciers'
Association. They are eligible in all North American associations
today.
Ironically,
the Rosses' involvement with Scottish folds had ended by this
time. The intransigence of the British cat fancy and the frustration
of seeing 15 years' effort go unrewarded in Great Britain
led the Rosses to give up their cats. Though the sacrifices
this hardworking couple had made went unappreciated in their
own country, the Rosses will always be regarded as the patron
saints of Scottish folds in America.
Into
the Mix
Breeders
in the United States used several shorthaired breeds in developing
the Scottish fold. They were obliged to do this because mating
one fold-eared cat to another, as we have noted, produces
kittens with skeletal defects. Thus, Exotic shorthairs, a
Burmese or two, and even the occasional Persians can be found
among the topmost branches in the family trees of many Scottish
folds. Furthermore, when folds obtained registration status
in the United States, one association allowed breeders to
outcross to Exotic shorthairs for a brief time. Eventually,
the approved outcrosses for Scottish folds were limited to
British and American shorthairs.
Although
fold breeders made no effort to promote longhairs, no one
seemed willing to take the necessary steps to eliminate them
either. The only way to remove an unwanted recessive like
long hair from a breeding program is to spay or neuter all
kittens who inherit that trait and all cats who produce it.
Because fold breeders were not unanimously willing to do this
-- and because some fold breeders continued to use Persians
and Exotic shorthairs in their breeding programs even after
it was no longer permissible to do so -- longhaired kittens
survived without sanction well into the 1980s. The longer
they survived, the more likely it became that one day they
would achieve championship status.
Good
Morning, America
No one
is certain where or by whom the first longhair folds were
shown in this country, but a number of them were exhibited
in household pet classes at The International Cat Association's
(TICA) shows in the northwest in 1982 and 1983. A few years
later longhaired folds began appearing on the East Coast,
and in 1986 a silver-tabby-and-white longhaired male appeared
on "Good Morning, America" to help promote TICA's show in
Madison Square Garden. In the fall of that year TICA's Scottish
Fold Breed Section voted 39 to 1 to accept longhaired Scottish
folds, which TICA calls Scottish fold longhairs, for
championship competition. Currently, the breed is accepted
by seven of the 10 associations that license cat shows in
North America. In some of those associations folds with long
hair are called longhair folds. In others they're called
Highland folds, an attempted reference to the geographical
origin of the Scottish fold. Highland is a misnomer,
however, and a source of amusement to Pat Turner.
"They're
not from the highlands at all," laughed Turner. "Over here
we call the longhaired folds Coupari," after the village
near the cottage where Susie was discovered by William Ross.
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