*denotes pictured cat

LEGGS
Sylphide & BEW Oriental Shorthairs
Lynne Von Egidy and Cathy Mallary

We were very happy to be asked to contribute an article about Sylphide and our white Oriental breeding program to this retrospective of the Oriental breed. Both of us have been actively involved with cats, and Orientals, since before Orientals were accepted in CFA, and in fact one of the cats (Y-Not Ivresse, a chestnut tabby) pictured in the first CFA OSH article still lives in Cathy’s house.

Lynne became interested in the whites very early on, when we first saw Petmark Pola of Mayflower* and her brother Petmark Point Blanc of LaMer. They were the first whites sired in this country by Rigodon Van Batn El Bakarah, the Dutch import who is the source of the white gene in our cats. In was not until a couple of years later that Lynne acquired her first white, Soreno Tenaya of Leggs, a granddaughter of Rigo, and Cathy didn’t get hooked on whites until Leggs Nikia (Sylphide’s mother) came on the scene.

Now, of course, we are both thoroughly committed to white, and while not every breeding we do involves whites, every plan we make is designed to help our white program.

Sylphide represents the fifth generation in direct descent from two foundation Oriental imports. Her maternal line goes back to Solitaire Keleawe, a chestnut female whose daughter, Petmark Guayabo of Thai-Ro, was the first chestnut OSH bred in this country and registered by CFA. Intriguingly, Keleawe herself was descended from a white Oriental, but the white color in Sylphide comes from Rigo who is the source of the white color in many of the white Orientals currently being bred in the U.S.

Sylphide’s two lines of descent from Rigo are as follows: Leggs Sylphide, our of Leggs Nikita, sired by Leggs Equus,* who was sired by Petmark Snow Prince, sired by Petmark Point Blanc of LaMer, sired by Rigodon Van Batn El Bakarah, and who was out of Soreno Tenaya of Leggs, out of Crystaljade Bianca of Soreno, sired by Rigodon Van Batn El Bakarah.

Sylphide’s five generation pedigree also shows descent from many of the influential Siamese lines developed over the last twenty years: Thaibok several times, Singa, Holcroft (all through her sire, Del-Ri’s Diamond Jubilee), Petmark several times (primarily through the two daughters of Petmark Nescafe* bred to Rigo), Calermar (through Snow Prince’s dam Calermar Sempr Fedelis. Much more rarely for an oriental, she is also descended from the Karnak Siamese line: Karnak Zapata appears in the fifth generation of her pedigree.

Breeding and exhibiting a white Oriental Shorthair is certainly one of the Cat Fancy’s best recipes for frustration. Almost every characteristic of prime importance in the OSH is hardest to achieve, or at least to present, in white. For example, even the slimmest woman will tell you that she gains five pounds to the eye in a white dress. Add just eight ounces to a sleek oriental cat, and you have made that cat non-competitive. The slightest fault in head structure will stand out glaringly. The white has no masking dense color and certainly no the luxury of facial marking to help disguise the inevitable (minor, we hope) head faults.

Then there’s that coat! We started out naively thinking that breeding a good quality white coat would be like breeding a good quality seal point coat. We should have known better. Proof positive of what we were up against was living in Cathy’s house: an old seal point spay with a quart-sized white spot in the middle of her back caused by an injury. The hairs in Goofy’s white spot had a completely different texture from her seal point hair for as long as she lived. The spot could easily be picked out by feel in the dark. Clearly color affects coat quality, Sylphide’s seal point sister had a wonderful painted on coat, but many people will remember Sylphide’s famous imitation of a Johnson’s cotton ball whenever the show hall was too cold or she was a little out of sorts. And thus was from the cat with probably the “best” white oriental coat to date.

Nothing in the Cat Fancy is without controversy, and the white Orientals are no exception. Here for instance, are two important questions to be answered over the next few years:

1.                            What colors represent the breeding of choice for white Orientals, or does it matter?

2.                            How is the well-known tendency of white cats to be deaf going to affect our cat breeding programs and how, if at all, can it be controlled or eliminated?

The white gene is dominant, it paints white over whatever other genes are present in the cat. The underlying color and pattern continues to be inherited in the normal fashion from generation to generation under the white. In breeds which encourage homozygous white breeding, the other colors, though present, may have been hidden for so many generations that there is no way of predicting what color is under the white. In our breeding program however, we are maintaining a heterozygous white line. We breed our whites only to pointed cats and the resulting litters produce pointed kittens, and the predictability of the color underneath the white remains possible.

Initially we maintained this pointed only policy to ensure that our whites had true Siamese deep blue eyes. More recently Leggs Solar was bred to a homozygous silver tabby Oriental (Felitan Spotty Dotty of Kalahari, homozygous for silver and tabby and all-over pattern) who produced two odd-eyed white kittens, each with one deep green and one deep blue eye. Now the overriding concern is not the eye shade but having bother eyes be the same color as odd-eyes are not allowed in the OSH standard.

The primary reason for imposing the heterozygous whites only limitation in our breeding program is the problem of deafness. The deafness problem is a thornier one, and the solution is not yet clear. . For the record, let no one tell you that “All blue-eyed white cats (including Orientals) are deaf” or that “Oriental whites don’t have a deafness problem.” Both statements are untrue. Deafness has occurred in BEW Orientals, and it has occurred in cats which are quite definitely pointed cats underneath the white. To date, we know of no incidence of direct parent to kitten inheritance of deafness: the only deaf white we know of who sired a deaf one, and the only deaf kittens we have produced came from two hearing parents.

Given this extremely unpredictable inheritance, eliminating deafness from our blue-eyed white cats is clearly going to be difficult, and may prove to be impossible. There are no deaf cats active in our breeding program at the moment, and we hope to keep that true. However, if a deaf cat were the only white available to maintain a family line, we would use that cat rather than sacrifice the bloodline, and not feel, at least on the evidence available to date, that we were significantly increasing the risk of deafness by doing so.

Sylphide, when presented with the opportunity to reproduce, decided that quality was more important than quantity and gave us one kitten, Leggs Solor, a handsome white male by Shera Len Nice Guy (a blue point Siamese). Solor showed very well as a kitten, ending up as 6^th best kitten in the NAR, granded easily, and went on to be 20^th best cat and best Oriental in the NAR all in 1988-89. To add frosting (vanilla) to the cake (white), his son Leggs Amapola of Mayflower,* owned by Muriel Slodden, one-upped him by placing not only as a kitten and a cat in the NAR, but also making best OSH in the country!

At any rate, with a little cooperation from our cats and lots from Lady Luck, we are going to continue to devote our energies to produce what the show spectator described as porcelain statue cats with purple eyes.

 In 1988-89, the year that Seareef’s Witch-A-Board was CFA’s Best OSH, the second Best OSH was GRC El-Dia Tinsel Town* belonging to Barbara Phelps, yet another Siamese breeder who drifted out of Siam into the whole world of the Orient. You may have noticed that solid ebony and solid white Orientals seem to have a special appeal, well black and white are as good together as apart, and black stripes on a white background? It never hurts to be a silver tabby either!