Dark brown, silky medium hair bob tail

[Aglaya Felipe]

I wish I had a picture for the kitty, Cocoa we used to have. We found her outside very young. Vet suggested maybe a Siamese and Minx mix but neither of those looks right. I couldn't find any solid chocolate Siamese, and her fur wasn't fluffy like a Minx either. I've never seen another cat like her, even in my googling, but she must have been some specific breed or rare expression. Completely chocolate brown, she had medium hair- more silky/shiny than wooly. She had light green eyes, a bobtail, many different chirpy vocalizations, and really strong hind legs. She could jump almost 8 feet straight up from sitting and was an excellent hunter. Any ideas what my sweet Cocoa could have been? I always wondered.

 

[lutece]

How long ago, and in what country did you find her?

 

[Aglaya Felipe]

This must have been 20 years ago we found her, United States, upstate NY.

 

[lutece]

Ok, that's helpful. Your description of a chocolate colored short-tailed cat doesn't exactly match any breed that would have existed at that time. However, it's possible that your Cocoa might have had ancestors in common with the now-extinct York Chocolate breed, which originated from farm cats in Grafton, NY (near Albany) in the 1980s and 1990s. The York Chocolate never became very popular, and it is believed that all the breeding lines have died out, so this breed is now considered extinct. It's not likely that Cocoa would have had York Chocolate ancestry herself, but since we know that the recessive chocolate allele existed in the farm cat population in Grafton, it's certainly possible that there could have been other cats carrying chocolate in upstate NY that could have been Cocoa's ancestors. So she might have been related.

As far as her short tail, bobbed tails in cats can have many causes. Some lose their tails because of an injury (for example, I had a cat whose mother chewed off most of his tail when he was born). There are also many known mutations that can cause bobbed or kinked tails in cats. Tail mutations can occur spontaneously in a population and aren't necessarily related to any specific breed. At this point it's not possible to say why Cocoa would have had a short tail, but it probably wasn't related to her chocolate color.

 

[lutece]

You can read more about the York Chocolate here if you are curious about the breed's history. Since the breed originated naturally from farm cats in that general area, she might have had ancestors in common with the cats pictured here

THE YORK CHOCOLATE

 

[Aglaya Felipe]

You can read more about the York Chocolate here if you are curious about the breed's history. Since the breed originated naturally from farm cats in that general area, she might have had ancestors in common with the cats pictured here

http://[URL]http://messybeast.com/york-chocolate.htm

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Oh my gosh, wow! Yes the true chocolate brown ones look just like her!! And the description of their fur and shape too, Grafton's about an hour north of where I grew up. I want to say we found her back in 2002 maybe, just a couple weeks or so old, she was just the size of your two hands together. Vet thought she'd been born with the bob tail but perhaps that was a mutation. That's amazing to learn! You never know who you might find in that area of NY. My friend was once stalked by a mountain lion that roamed the forest in Spencertown on her mountain. I saw a snowy lynx out the same way- couldn't believe my eyes! I thought it was a bobcat, but between the coloring, the size and the main thing- the set of their eyes and the shape of their face, lynx. Unfortunately I got such a good long look because I was attempting a rescue from the road. (Eventually the lynx loped off into the woods and when I came back with my rehabilitator friend we couldn't find them- but hopefully that means they made it). We were at least a couple hundred miles south of where they're supposed to roam but it was amazing to see. Encountered a coy- wolf too but that's another story.