CATS: FREAK BREEDS

As you've seen, I sometimes like to reprint Funny Cat photos that particularly strike me. But there are also snaps which also strike me that I don't put up on this blog because I just don't like them. The majority of these are pictures of what I call freak breeds such as the hairless Sphynx..

These poor creatures are hideous and about as appealing to me as a human being without skin. I'm sure that in character they are typical cats, affectionate and loveable, but they are freaks. They are deliberately created by humans out of some perverse aesthetic need. It does the cats no good at all as they have to be house cats. They couldn't survive outside.

Then there are the cats with stumpy legs like a dachsund. This cat is just deformed. It's unable to jump properly like a normal cat and like its own instinct tells it to. Again, it will have to spend all its life indoors, or at best in a high walled garden.

It's one thing to encourage certain traits that don't distort cats significantly from the norm, such as a particular type of fur, though I'm not keen on the long thick coats. Sure there are exceptions  -the Maine Coon is a good example of a healthy breed adapted to a harsher environment, or the attractive British Blue- but it just makes me sick when they are bred for a freakish non-survival trait such as the two above and those with ear folds whatever they are called.

But then I should declare my bias -I don't like breeders in general. Yeah, sure there are decent one who care about the health of their animals, but most I suspect are just in it for the money and if that means freak breeds, so what.

I may have mentioned this before but once at Vets4Pets, a woman who bred pugs asked me if we had any cats as they lived on a farm and needed them to keep the mice and rats down. And, oh yes, because they were near a main road, cats were always getting knocked down.