TIFFANY CHANTILLY CAT BREED

History
The Chantilly’s long road to acceptance started in 1967. The breed’s originator, Jennie Robinson, bought two cats, an 18-month-old male and a 6-month-old female, from a pet shop in White Plains, New York. She was told the cats had belonged to someone who had recently died. Several years later, ACA registered the cats, Thomas and Shirley of Neotype, as “Sable Foreign Longhairs”.

Nature took its course and Thomas and Shirley produced their first litter in May 1969. Shirley and Thomas continued to live long and prosper; producing something like 60 kittens in a span of about 7 years says Robinson. During the early 1970s Robinson showed Thomas and several of his kittens in the New York metropolitan area. Other breeders who owned Thomas’s offspring showed them in Long Island and Connecticut.

Because of the Tiffany’s color, early breeders assumed the breed was related to the Burmese, although no known connection exists. Since chocolate, long hair, and gold-colored eyes are all recessive traits, and the cats bred true from the beginning, it seemed certain that someone had been working with these cats. But who and for what purpose remains a mystery. Robinson also notes that the kittens had gold eyes with a distinct green halo, silky chocolate coats without any black hue, and, unlike the sable Burmese, and pink paw pads.

Robinson stopped breeding the Tiffany, but in the 1970s Sigyn Lund took up the torch, buying Robinson’s cats and continuing to work with the breed until the mid-1980s. Because show judges had found the name “Foreign Longhair” to be too general, a new name was needed. Lund chose “Tiffany” because of the Tiffany Theatre whose name was associated with class and elegance.

Since Lund was a Burmese breeder, fanciers assumed the breed was a longhaired Burmese bred from her Burmese stock, although this was apparently not the case. During this time, trouble began for the Tiffany. Articles and books reported the Tiffany as a longhaired version of the Burmese, creating confusion. In 1979 TICA recognized the Tiffany, but in the Burmese breed section. And ACA dropped the breed from recognition because it was so rare.

Even more confusing, the GCCF in Britain began calling a Burmese and Silver Chinchilla Persian hybrid the “Tiffanie” (The shorthaired version of the Tiffanie is known as the “Asian Burmilla”) When Lund stopped breeding in the mid-1980s, the Tiffany came perilously close to extinction as a breed.

Tiffany advocate Tracy Oraas began her involvement with the breed in 1988, when she responded to a classified ad advertising “Chocolate kittens” Oraas got in touch with Siamese Oriental breeder Jan DeRegt. DeRegt undertook efforts to reestablish the breed after consulting a TICA judge who proclaimed that nothing on the show bench compared with them. With some detective work (including calls to all the veterinarians in Florida), Oraas and DeRegt managed to contact the Tiffany’s first breeders, Jennie Robinson and Sigyn Lund. After much research, Oraas and DeRegt concluded that the Burmese was never used in any Tiffany breeding program, nor was the Tiffany the product of British crosses between Burmese and Himalayans. Their research did reveal that English breeders had crossed Foreign Longhairs (Angoras), Havana Browns, and Abyssinians in an attempt to recreate an Angora-type cat. They suspect that the Tiffany may have been a product of these efforts.

In 1992 Oraas and DeRegt were asked to rename the breed because of possible confusion between the Tiffany and the British breed, the Tiffanie. The breed is now known as both the Tiffany and as the Chantilly and the names Tiffany and Chantilly have been copyrighted to prevent others from using the names and creating more confusion.