This makes me think about that Bill Nye debate vs. Ken Ham where he was saying that “kinds” never crossed paths. Are there any examples of animals being bred into completely different types of animals? Stuff like this gets pretty close, although from the looks of it, I’d stick call it a cat. How many generations would it take to breed a cat into something that more closely resembled a dog?
My wife always mentions that we could have bred a great line of cats with two of our strays – she is super sweet and mellow and he is super friendly and incredibly smart.
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These cats are likely just the halfway point to getting to the Sphinx (hairless) cat breed.
It will be a grand day when they turn a feline into a K-9. Allah-Kazzam!
Race traitors, the lot of them. Baraminologists everywhere would not approve.
The guy who started the Labradoodle craze has gone on record as saying he regrets it and sees nothing good about this “designer dog” fetish. Seems like the same should hold true for designer cats.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Labradoodle-creator-laments-designer-dog-craze-5211330.php
(However I reserve the right to think that my friend’s Sphinx kittens are the most amazing aliens on the planet, and to fantasize about having my own. Meanwhile, my 3 rescues will inevitably be replaced by more rescues when the time comes.)
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And is it aesthetic, either ? I am not seeing the beauty here.
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Tabbies for the win.
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That “cat” might look like a wolf to someone who is blind, drunk, and stupid.
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So, 90% of the [redacted] US political party, eh?
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We are being haunted by several of these incredible cats & are working to make them a new breed.
Mercy, don’t we have anything better to do anymore?
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Someone that once lived down the street from me had such a cat. Their chubby cat was outside most of the time. When I’d walk up to my apartment, it would run up to greet me and rear up on its haunches. We saw another cat over the summer that would roll over on its back and let us pet it on the tummy (unusual among cats I’ve encountered). Some cats apparently think they are dogs…
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Uhm… I agree that there are lots of shelter cats out there who are looking for homes. (And lots more feral cats that need neutering – I applaud those who undertake that thankless effort!)
But I don’t have anything against purebreds. Siamese, for example, DO have not just appearance but personality traits which make them particularly appealing to some of us (and particularly annoying to others). Ditto many of the other breeds. Unless you’re also going to rag on everyone who happens to have a named-breed dog – or named-breed of any other animal – you’re being inconsistent and unreasonable.
I give the SPCA a large chunk of change each year. If I wanted a purebred, I’d get one and feel no shame whatsoever.
Moreover, I have to point out that the way new breeds arise is not “someone wanted a cat that looked like a wolf” – it’s a matter of random genetics happening to produce a cat with interesting pattern, and breeders saying “that’s nice, I’d like to see more of those” and trying to fix that gene while maintaining enough genetic diversity otherwise – and screening out negative traits – to produce a stable healthy population with the new appearance. A reputable breeder won’t market a new breed until and unless the animals ARE healthy by all reasonable standards.
As far as picking a name for it goes, that comes after the variation arises. The coloration suggested wolf to them, so that’s what they called it. They may have too much imagination, they may not have enough imagination, but ragging on them for the name is like making fun of a human’s name – it’s often an easy target,but doing so tells us more about you than about them.
As far as whether you think it looks good or not: I’ll trust the market to work that one out. I honestly can’t tell from one possibly-overdramatic photo. It’s definitely different. It’s interesting. I don’t feel a need to immediately seek one out – there are lots of critters I want to meet to find out whether they really look like they do in photos and to find out what they’re like as individuals, and this is just another on the list – but I can see where some might go “oh wow”; whether you think it’s attractive or not, it is striking.
Personally I’m waiting for them to lick the endocrinology challenges so we can captive-breed cheetahs. Meanwhile I had a Meezer, I have two marmalades, and I expect I’ll host many other felines over the years, purebred, alleycat, or anything in between.
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Cats have a wide variety of behaviors, and as someone with cats that are a specific “breed,” I found out early on from researching cat breeds that the basic housecat “shape” is extremely resilient – it only takes a couple generations of mixed breeding for any cat breed to return to the generic “random cat” shape and coloration.
However, the “cat/dog breed versus SPCA” thing misses the major point that the vast majority of shelter animals come from people who do NOT spay or neuter their animals and end up breeding animals with no intention of it. Daisy comes home pregnant, or Fluffy develops a bump after getting out for a night while in heat, and Spot and Patches are so happy with their testicles! Those random shelter animals largely come from leftovers that couldn’t be sold out of trunks at the nearest parking lot, as families pick up animals on the cheap and then realize that the $50 puppy or kitten that was never given shots, not socialized around people, and taken away from mom much too early are actually really traumatized and will never be normal animals.
Ideally, the SPCA and adoption shelters would only have animals from people who, due to a change in living situation, can’t keep an animal, but it’s simply not true. Real, licensed breeders only breed their animals when they have a waitlist and demand for their breed, and are keenly interested in maintaining a certain look or temperament for their chosen breed. Because, you know, pets are expensive, and a big responsibility. They shouldn’t be picked up for cheap and with no real thought given to their wellbeing. Most people I know are great pet parents, but even among my friends I’ve had the occasional few who refuse to spay or neuter their animals, because “they’re so attractive” and “they seem so well behaved, I couldn’t bear to put them through that change.”
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I’ve never regretted neutering my pets. I’ve sometimes regretted not neutering myself. (I suppose I still could.)
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And, yeah, the problem isn’t the serious breeders, it’s the folks who want to be breeders and don’t have a clue – or who are doing it because they’re jumping on a popularity surge for a particular breed to make a fast buck rather than because they actually care about the animals.
That’s tended to happen more often with dogs than cats, from what I’ve seen over the years.
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That would be our latest… Drops down dead if you shoot him with your finger and then goes belly-up if you tell him to play 'possum – one of the oddest cats I have met.
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In general dogs are easier to train than cats, because in general dogs care more about pack status – and about approval from their alphas – than cats do. But that varies with the cat, and varies with the trainer’s patience, and varies with whether you’re clever enough to work from something the cat already does.
One of mine is trying to train me to play fetch. She brings me a toy, hoping that I’ll throw it down the length of the house (preferably bouncing off a few surfaces) so she can chase it. I’m trying to shape this behavior so she’ll reliably bring it directly to me rather than dropping it somewhere near me, but it’s difficult – not least because if she can actually see me while she’s coming back she gets distracted, drops the toy, and comes to nuzzle me, then can’t seem to figure out why the toy isn’t there for me to throw… I’m hoping that particular neuron connects eventually, but I’m not holding my breath.
Then again, this is the cat whose tongue starts licking empty air a good 30 seconds before she decides she should wash something with it. Not the brightest crayon in the box. But hey, she does pretty good with a brain the size of a walnut.
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I can’t answer that question, but it’s possible at some point- hyenas are more closely related to cats than to dogs, but are often mistaken for canids.They’re also closely related to meerkats, if you can believe it.
The thing I want to know about this new breed is whether – as the photo suggests – it’s another temperature-sensitive coloration, which is what causes the “points” in siamese (and what causes them to generally be darker as adults than as kittens). If so, that might be a really interesting gene to study.
(Corrected typo, “The think” … though it was sorta appropriate, if ungramattiwock.)
