The most fascinating cat phenomenon I've seen moderating a cat breed forum is undeniably Indian Persian cats. It's such a complicated mix of cat genetics, geography, colonialism, and Victorian race science. I don't fully understand it all. And it's not like I have the cultural background or language skills to have delicate conversations with cat breeders in India about where their cats really come from.
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.
(God, how did I end up with this gig? "You hate modern cat breeds and aren't afraid to back it up with research? Come tell people what breed their cat is multiple times a day!")
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