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Hey, Sailor
The Union of Myanmar was chosen to replace Burma in
order to publicize the fact that the country is composed
not only of the Burman majority but also of various
other ethnic groups. This circumstance might warrant
affirmation in the political fancy, but in the cat fancy
a multiethnic background is often cause for censure.
Indeed, the presence of more than one genetic strain in
the Burmese led to CFA's disenfranchising the breed in
1947, but that's getting ahead of our story.
Said story begins in 1930 with the arrival of a cat
named Wong Mau in San Francisco. Some Burmese breed
historians write that Wong Mau was given to Joseph C.
Thompson, a Navy psychiatrist, by one Buck "Bring 'em
Back Alive" Wilson, an animal collector who had acquired
Wong Mau in Burma. Other observers suggest that Thompson
himself brought Wong Mau back alive from Burma,
following a tour of duty as a ship's doctor.
Whoever escorted Wong Mau to San Francisco, Thompson was
fascinated by her appearance, especially by her
walnut-brown color. She was much darker than a Siamese,
even in those days; and her points -- i.e., the color on
her face, feet, ears and tail -- were darker still. A
small cat, Wong Mau was more compact than a Siamese. In
addition, she had a shorter tail, a rounder head, a
shorter muzzle, rounder eyes and greater distance
between the eyes than did the Siamese.
Some writers report that Thompson bred Siamese; others
simply assert that he had an interest in genetics.
Whatever the case, the more he admired Wong Mau, the
more he believed she might be the foremother of a new
breed of cat. This notion was not seconded by most
Siamese breeders, who considered Wong Mau nothing more
unusual than a poor Siamese with poorer color. (Their
contention -- if not their contentiousness -- is easier
to understand if we remember that it was not as simple
to distinguish a Siamese from Wong Mau in 1930 as it is
to distinguish a Siamese from a Burmese today.)
Breeders expressed their discontent loudly when Thompson
took Wong Mau to a show in San Francisco. They howled
even louder when Wong Mau was bred to a sealpoint
Siamese male and some of her kittens, born on August 16,
1932, looked for all the world like Siamese. (This union
made sense geographically as well as physically, for
Siam, now Thailand, forms the southeast border of
Burma/Myanmar.)
The other kittens in Wong Mau's first litter had their
mother's dark-brown body and darker-yet point color.
When cats with this coloration were bred to one another,
and when dark-bodied males were bred to Wong Mau, they
produced even-shaded, dark-all-over kittens, whose color
resembled that of today's Burmese. Such outcomes
indicated that although Wong Mau may have had the
potential of giving birth to a new breed of pedigreed
cat -- all modern-day Burmese are, in fact, descended
from her -- she was not herself a "purebred."
Persons who know more about genetics than the rest of us
conclude that Wong Mau was a mixed-breed cat with at
least one Siamese ancestor. What's more, argued
Rosemonde S. Peltz, M.D., in the 1978 CFA Yearbook, in
addition to carrying a recessive Siamese gene, Wong Mau
was carrying "a previously unidentified allele [gene]"
which is dominant to the allele for Siamese markings.
Cats with two copies of this previously undiscovered
allele, subsequently called "the Burmese gene," inherit
the all-brown Burmese color. Cats with one Burmese gene
and one Siamese gene look like Wong Mau. Cats with two
Siamese genes, naturally, look like Siamese.
Royal Neighbors
So great was Wong Mau's importance to her descendants
that little has been written about the cats from which
she had descended. As early as 1903, British cat
fancier, author and judge Frances Simpson described two
kinds of Siamese cats then being exhibited in England.
The more popular variety, the Royal Cat of Siam, was a
cream-colored cat with dark points and blue eyes. The
second variety, known simply as "chocolate," was
virtually identical to the royal cats, save for its coat
color, which Simpson described as "subtly shaded ... a
deep brown with hardly any markings," and amber-colored
eyes. This chocolate cat may have been, if not a distant
relative, at least a compatriot of Wong Mau's.
A third cat from that region of the Far East -- this one
called a "Rajah" cat -- was described by another British
cat maven, Harrison Weir, in 1889. According to Weir,
the Rajah cat exhibited a uniform chocolate color and
deep-amber eyes. Fifty-nine years later Rajah cats were
described in an article that appeared in an American cat
publication. The author of this piece, a serviceman who
had been stationed in the Far East during World War II,
reported that Rajah cats were "a recognized breed" and
that they resembled Wong Mau.
Burma/Myanmar and Siam/Thailand being neighbors, it is
not surprising that the same kinds of fables that attend
the origin of the Siamese also grace the stories of the
Burmese' origin. Like the Siamese, the Burmese are said
to have been temple cats for whom student monks served
as valets. Some writings even suggest that Burmese were
favored by royal and/or noble families long before
Siamese achieved that status.
We should also note that brown cats, whether
even-colored or subtly pointed, are seldom seen in the
domestic cat population of Malaysia. Domestic cats in
that part of the world, save for a much higher than
usual incidence of kinked tails, are not appreciably
different from domestic cats anywhere else.
Fouling the Pool
Despite the objections of the Siamese set, Joseph
Thompson was able to obtain official recognition for his
beloved Burmese in two cat associations -- CFA and the
American Cat Association (ACA) -- by the mid-1930s. This
achievement, for which he should have received the cat
fancy's equivalent of the Navy Cross, did nothing to
disarm Siamese breeders. They raised such a caterwaul
when Thompson entered a Burmese in a San Francisco show
in 1938 that he withdrew from the proceedings.
The slings and arrows of outraged cat fanciers were not
the worst of the Burmese' problems. Despite the
importation of three Burmese from Rangoon in 1941,
Burmese breeders were obliged to use sealpoint Siamese
in their breeding programs in order to keep the Burmese
gene pool from evaporating. Most Burmese cats,
therefore, could not meet CFA's requirement that a
purebred cat must be descended from three generations of
similar purebred cats, and CFA officially de-recognized
the Burmese in 1947.
Fortunately other cat associations did not drum the
Burmese out of the corps, and this continued
recognition, coupled with the determination exhibited by
some advocates of the breed, helped to save the Burmese
from extinction. To be sure, by the 1956-57 show season,
there were enough Burmese that met CFA's
three-generation rule to qualify the breed for
reinstatement.
Nonprimary Colors
Peace did not prevail in the Burmese congregation for
long. The next controversy to visit the faithful erupted
when some breeders sought to obtain official recognition
for the nonbrown kittens that appeared from time to time
in Burmese litters. These kittens, who came arrayed in
blue, champagne or platinum color, were bequeathed their
novel hues by dilute genes. Perhaps Wong Mau possessed
these genes, perhaps they were contributed by some of
the Siamese that were used to help establish the Burmese
in America. The sable-only crowd was more concerned with
outcomes than with origins, and the outcome they
demanded was the exclusion from polite society of any
Burmese that wasn't done up brown. They were not
successful, and eventually Burmese in dilute colors were
accepted by all cat associations. True to form, CFA
insisted on calling these cats Malayans for a time,
while The International Cat Association accepted Burmese
in more colors -- cinnamon, cream, red and tortoiseshell
-- than did any other registry.
A New Tradition
When the Burmese faithful weren't rending their garments
over color, they were working up a froth over
conformation. Coincident with a big-time increase in the
breed's popularity, which increase began in the
mid-1970s, there occurred a transformation in the
appearance of some Burmese. Noses became noticeably
shorter, skulls became increasingly rounder, and eyes
grew obviously more pronounced. This new fashion
statement, known as the "contemporary" look, came to
dominate the breed by the 1980s; but "in some cases,"
wrote Gebhardt, this new look "carried with it certain
deformities." These included cleft palates, skulls that
didn't close and other deformities that affected the
survival rate of kittens. Such defects were virtually
nonexistent in the soon-to-be-declassed, "traditional"
Burmese.
The more sanguine among the new-look breeders claimed
that Burmese problems could be bred away or minimized
through judicious outcrossing. Advocates of the
traditional, less extreme look maintained that only a
dedication to the use of cats from traditional
bloodlines would solve the problem. The Governing
Council of the Cat Fancy in England, weighing in on the
side of the traditional American breeders, banned the
registration of any Burmese imported from North America,
in order to prevent the introduction of "defective"
genes into British Burmese catteries.
An article in the Cat Fanciers' Almanac for June 1997
assured everyone that "the Burmese breed is not
suffering from an unusually small or very restricted
gene pool. An early result of the Feline Genome Project
currently being done by the National Cancer Institute
was the finding that the Burmese breed appears to have
plenty of genetic diversity."
Genetic diversity, however, is not the main issue here,
so this assurance amounts to an answer in search of a
question. There was enough outcrossing done by Burmese
breeders, both before and after the breed's
reinstatement by CFA, to ensure a substantial gene pool.
The problem is the suspected presence of rogue genes in
some Burmese bloodlines, and those breeders who worry
about the effect of such genes might point to a drastic
decline in Burmese registrations as proof of the
legitimacy of their concern.
In 1989 there were 1,206 new Burmese registrations in
CFA, and the breed stood fifth among 35 registered
breeds. Last year there were 844 new Burmese
registrations, and Burms had dropped to 11th among 37
CFA-registered breeds. Considered in isolation, that 30
percent decline in registrations in less than a decade
looks imposing. To be fair, however, CFA registrations
plummeted 23 percent across the board during that same
period. Thus, the fact that Burmese outperformed the
market by 7 percent may or may not be significant. One
hopes for the sake of the cats that it is not.
Personality Plus
"To own one, to know one, is to love them all," wrote
Burmese fancier Doris Springer in 1964 after 30 years'
of knowing, owning, and loving Burmese. "No other cat
gives as much affection without reservation . . . and in
turn requires so much love and affection to lead a happy
life."
The Burmese is a most intelligent, devoted and amusing
cat -- and one that is frequently in the news. A Burmese
owner, exasperated because her cat insisted on going
walkabout, affixed a phone card to the cat's collar so
that anyone who found her could report her missing
without having to pay for the call. An 8-year-old
Burmese captured The Daily Telegraph's (London)
cat-burglar-of-the-year award in 1996. The cumulative
list of acquisitions he had brought home from other
people's houses during a six-year career include a pink
powder-puff mounted on a short handle, three feather
dusters, all with 2-foot-long handles, a polo-neck
jersey, a fur tippet, a fur hat, numerous socks, six
teddy bears, three bunny rabbits, a Mickey Mouse, a
panda, a musical tortoise, a dinosaur, a whale, a skunk
and a gorilla.
Finally, the notion that once you own a Burmese, you
can't bear to live without one was made distressingly
clear five years ago when a 79-year-old man drowned
himself rather than continue living without his Burmese
cat, who had disappeared 12 months earlier.
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