COLORPOINT SHORTHAIR CAT BREED

Colorpoint Shorthair Cat Breed – CatsPlace.org

History
The Colorpoint Cat shares body style, personality, coat length, and color pattern with the Siamese, but in the untraditional colors of red, cream, tortoiseshell, and lynx (tabby) points. Two separate schools of thought exist about the Colorpoint Shorthair: those who think that a breed that walks, talks, and looks like a Siamese should be considered Siamese, and those who deem the Colorpoint a Siamese hybrid. The doubt lies in definition “what is a purebred Siamese” And where do you draw the line?

In the CFA, the Siamese comes in four colors only: seal, blue, chocolate, and lilac points. These traditional colors are considered natural mutations developed and refined by breeders, although evidence shows that quite a lot of outcrossing may have occurred along the bloodline.

The effort to produce a Siamese-style pointed cat in colors other than the traditional four began in England and in America in the 1940s, carried out by breeders who used foundation crossings between the Siamese, Abyssinian, and the red domestic shorthair. The American Shorthair also became part of the matrix. Initially, the Colorpoint cat breeders experienced setbacks and failures; in the effort to achieve the proper colors in the proper places, the Siamese body type was often sacrificed. The breeding was further complicated by the difficulty of working with the red coloration because it is a sex-linked color.

Once the color and pattern were achieved by line breeding, the lines were then crossed back to the Siamese to reestablish the body style, personality, and coat texture and length. While technically a hybrid, the Colorpoint now has little non-Siamese gene inheritance, based on a ten-generation bloodline bred back to the Siamese after the color has been achieved.

Regardless of how alike the two breeds were, some Siamese breeders were upset about the new colors. To appease the breeders who wanted to keep their lines pure, the breeders working with the new colors accepted the name Colorpoint Shorthair cat for CFA registration purposes. In 1974 the breed was accepted for CFA Championship and Colorpoint cat breed fanciers finally had a forum for their color creations. Some of the other U.S. associations simply extended the Siamese standard to include the new colors, which may not be as genetically accurate, but is certainly a lot less confusing. In the British Governing Council of the Cat Fancy, the Colorpoint Shorthair is called Siamese but given a different breed classification number, indicating that they, too, have reservations about the Colorpoint being bona fide Siamese.