what if I just made my profile picture a male calico cat or something. hurm
Could I suggest a picture of Dawntreader Texas Calboy? He is a beautiful male calico cat who is a chimera. He's also somewhat controversial among some cat fancy associations since he is a male cat with female colors, and some people are strangely transphobic towards him, despite him being a cat? There was even a rule implemented to keep him from competing in a cat show. If you look up his name, he made a few news articles.
Oh my god?????
Yeah you're right about beautiful I'm squeezing him until he pops!!!!! I love this guy I think I'm going to make an edit real quickly Calboy I love you I'm so sorry people are calling you a freak??????
This is funnier than it should be. He's so angry about it. WHY ARE YOU MISGENDERING THE CAT.
To be fair, I don't think he was referring to the cat (who wasn't there) but to the cat's owner (who is a woman and who the author had been asking if anyone could point them in her direction).
Still hilarious that they're pitching a fit over a boy cat being calico, tho. Like idk man maybe your cat show rules are stupid if you're going to gender-lock coloring? /shrugs just me, maybe.
also, hang on - why DON'T they allow three-legged cats? You mean to tell me if an absolutely perfect show cat has some sort of tragic accident resulting in losing a limb (obviously incredibly unlikely considering how pampered these animals are but like WHAT IF), that could no longer be shown?
So I'm not sure about what happens if a show cat has an accident (like if it was hit by a car or something) but limb difference due to genetics or something like cancer is a DQ from pedigree competition because it can indicate something bad you don't want in your preservation breeding gene pool (i.e. it could lead to unhealthy offspring if you were to breed the cat). This is especially true for issues that can be considered "desirable" (like dwarfism), because breeding those on purpose is not considered by CFA to be good for the cat or its offspring, and drives demand for unscrupulous backyard breeding.
Three legged cats to my understanding are allowed in Household Pet 😊
Edit to add: @ruffboi-mags it's not the color itself that's the problem. Calico gene expression is a sex-linked trait associated with female cats, which in a male cat indicates an abnormality in the cat's genetics. While that isn't an inherently bad thing for the cat, assuming no other health problems arise from it, it's likely a disqualification from pedigree judging because CFA doesn't want to encourage the breeding of cats that are genetically abnormal for novelty purposes.
So that should be the only response they give. "Because we do not want to encourage intentional breeding of genetic abnormalities that could be harmful to the cats, we do not allow this trait in pedigree competitions."
Pretty easy.
I mean that said i think a large amount of pedigree standards (and the people creating/upholding them) are not nearly as concerned about the health of an animal's genetics as you or they would like us to believe, considering THIS is the first face you see on the CFA's page on Persians
there are ways to breed persians without such extreme brachycephalic traits, but then they generally don't meet pedigree breed standards bc their noses aren't short enough. And since they're the most low-hanging fruit for argument if they try to say they're excluding something to not encourage breeding that could be genetically detrimental to the animals, I'd guess their clear hypocrisy is probably why they don't just say that. Because it's not true, it's just their justification.
Also, if you think Persians aren't the same thing because it was just the result of long intentional breeding rather than a genetic abnormality, fine: you want to know what breed is entirely based on a genetic abnormality that is provably tied to actual detrimental health issues that the CFA DOES recognize (and thus contributes to the continued novelty breeding of)?
Scottish Folds.
So yeaaaaah, I'm much more inclined to believe that certain people did not want a BOY cat with a GIRL coat coloring winning a title than there being any actual concern about novelty breeding (or frankly the health and overall well-being of the cat or his offspring) when they made that ruling.
There's an even more blatant reason it's not about genetic health and breeding:
They're sterile.
Klinefelter syndrome, which is what causes this coat expression in males, results in non-viable sperm production. Male calicos are terile, so they literally cannot be bred.
XXY calico males are sterile but this particular one has chimerism instead so he's probably not sterile, but he also can't really pass the trait down either, i don't think chimerism is heritable.
