Purebred cat
A show cat (also known as a purebred or pedigreed cat) is one that has been judged to be close to the physical ideal for its breed. A prize-winning pedigreed show cat can be worth thousands of dollars. Because these cats are so valuable, they are often identified at birth with a breeder's mark - a small tattoo on their ear, and in recent years, they may have identifying microchip implants as well.
Purebred cats are prone to a number of health problems that are not generally experienced by non-pedigreed moggies. This is because their genetic base for many breeds is quite small and they are thus inbred. For instance, the breeding pool for CFA-registered Havana Brown cats is under 130 cats as of the late 1990s. Some breeds of cat have been created by taking a single tom cat or queen with an unusual physical characteristic that breeds true. The entire Cornish Rex breed can be traced back to a single parent animal with an unusual genetic mutation. Both the Burmese and Tonkinese breeds can be traced back to a single cat, Wong Mau, which was brought from Burma in the 1930s. Breeders continually strive to eliminate negative characteristics that various cat breeds exhibit as the breeds are developed.
Cat breeders are continually competing to find the 'purest' of the species - the bushiest tails, longest ears, shortest muzzles etc. Because of this, the physical characteristic of a prize-winning show cat have been gradually exaggerated to the extent that some of them look like an entirely different species of animal. This genetic shifting is most obvious in the two oldest and most distinctive breeds of show cat - the Persian cat and the Siamese cat.
See also: List of cat breeds
