A Guy Can Be So Pronouns

But here are the facts Wikipedia can tell you:

From the 1600s to the 1800s, Europeans saw and sometimes obtained cats with very long and silky hair that were said to come from somewhere in the Levant/Middle East/Central Asia. Possibly Persia or Khorasan

Khorasan is a region divided by Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan. It seems to have some relationship with cats with long silky hair.

As the British colonized India, reports of these cats and how they were even imported into northern India from Afghanistan became more and more frequent.

In London in 1871, the Crystal Palace hosted the first known cat show.

Cats, I hasten to point out, didn't really have "breeds" the way we see them in dogs, horses, or cows. Humans didn't play a huge role in choosing which cats would breed with which in their history. It is, in fact, significantly harder to prevent cats from fucking whoever they damn well want to. Most major differences between cats before the late 19th century were caused by geographic barriers that placed natural limitations on the pool of available feline fuckbuddies. But this was a time when humans had cracked evolution and Mendelian genetics and we were breeding cows and pigs and tea roses of gargantuan size, and apparently we looked at cats and thought, "Why not them too?"

So, 1871. Cats of unparalleled regal fluffiness and an exotic origin story. This was also when Siamese cats made their public début, but the colourpoint/acromelanism gene of Southeast Asia was genuinely unique and rare in Europe. You really did need imported breeding stock for Siamese cats.

But these days we have DNA and can compare relatedness between breeds and feral cat populations, and modern pedigreed Persian cats do not show much genetic interrelatedness with cats from Central Asia, but they are very interrelated with... the British Shorthair. And feral cats of Western Europe.

So I'm not saying everyone in 1871 was out in rural Shropshire hunting farmyards and barns for the fluffiest kitten known to man to win the next year's cat show with, but like... look me in the eye and say that isn't what happened. I dare you.

Persians in the West, being one of the oldest cat breeds, have had a lot of time to develop some really stellar inbred traits like the smashed-in face beloved of the 1950s that makes it hard for them to groom themselves, breathe easily, or make their teeth match without a massive underbite. Breeders are now trying to breed away to a healthier "doll-faced" standard, but they're not winning huge popularity prizes.

Meanwhile, in India... you still have a ton of completely majestic cats descended from the ones that kicked off the Persian craze in the first place. Perhaps actually from Persia, or at least Khorasan. None of whom count as "real Persians" because they didn't get named Wiggles McSnugglebutt III by a woman in Berkshire before being exported to India.

Except you actually do have a fair number of purebred western-style Persians, except hold the Persian part of their ancestry, brought to India and sold for huge amounts of money to win Western-style cat shows.

All of which to say: What the fuck???

So every couple weeks someone from India posts their beautiful fluffy "Persian" cat to the cat breeds forum and gets completely dogpiled because they don't have a documented pedigree and a fucked-up face for their pains, and I'm left struggling in an attempt to communicate that their cat (like every cat) is special and wonderful and also cat breeds are incredibly weird.

(I'm not very good with geography. I should practice more with learning geography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification

Oh, except I didn't leave on the listing for gray. Gray on this climate map is "Polar/Tundra". That's the beginning of the whole Tibetan Plateau just on the map's right edge. So within the map, the big purple swath in Afghanistan comes from the Hindu Kush, which you may not have heard of because it's like Jesus's kid brother in terms of mountains. It doesn't have any of the 14 eight-thousanders, the biggest mountains in the world, the way its next-door neighbour, the Karakoram range does. Though the Karakoram range is the kid brother of its neighbour, the Himalayas, so at least it doesn't get much joy out of the matter.

The Hindu Kush is still plenty high, though. On any other continent, it'd be a total stunner. So in this area you do have hot deserts, but you also have towering mountains packed with snow, and many sub-climates in between them. And overtop everything, a constant aridity and the lack of nearby oceans to stop the temperature from plummeting at night.

>Hear people constantly complaining that the current union leadership is super corrupt, it's all just the same ten guys making all the decisions in secret and nobody else in the union ever gets to know what's going on

>Go to the monthly union meetings that are completely open to all 1200 union members