How would I describe Willow?

[Willow's Mom]

My avatar picture is one of my very favourites or else just click on my profile---most of my posts are pictures or just gushing about how much I love this new baby.
Of course any mostly solid grey cat is going to get the comment, "Hey, you've got a Russian Blue on your shoulder!" and the fact that she's big for her age (she's four months old), kind of stocky, and has a fantastic coat isn't going to make the comments any less frequent. Koala had the same length and softness of coat so I already thought he was going to have long hair and I know Willow won't. She's a domestic shorthair with some sort of oriental breed mixed in there.

She's exactly one of my fantasies about "the kind of kitten I want" from before gotcha day, and that was the same kind of cat as Koala and both of my cats named Blackie: vocal, intelligent, and kind of doglike in the way meezers are but with enough domestic shorthair to mellow them out enough to be a great pet for a kid or a little old lady who doesn't really need or want a purebred.

My Burmese was way more sensitive than these mixed breed cats are and neither she nor my Aby did as well with me as my domestic shorthairs and these Siamese mixes have. I thought about getting a meezer if one became available until after Willow came home and I saw what the breeders have been up to: they look way too fragile and small for the life I live now. They don't look like Willow.

I know that she was one of eight kittens, one of which had points. I saw her mother, who is a very large tuxedo DSH that didn't have the husky meezer voice or other breed characteristics I know and love from my mixes. I asked for temperament rather than points and I sure got it!

In the early 1970s, we just called the first Blackie "Siamese" even though he obviously wasn't because his personality was so different than the other cats. I don't have DNA tests for my dogs and get kind of annoyed by people who expect that I do or that I can tell them exactly what kind of discarded designer dogs they are instead of just saying "Chihuahua mixed with some sort of terrier" and I don't want to see the same excesses of dog breeding encouraged in cat breeders.

So no, that is NOT a Russian Blue on my shoulder and we all know that, but what would be the best way to describe a young lady with a husky voice, an affectionate personality, a love of adventure, a lack of fear, the ability to learn how to make me give her a kitty treat when I say the word "sit" even faster than the dogs she loves as adopted littermates can, and all the other qualities that make it obvious that she is most likely of Siamese (or some similar oriental breed) descent?

 

[KittyCat Angel]

Awww Looks like a grey cat I once had. I don't know breeds. There is a cat like that roaming around here that belongs to someone .

 

[lutece]

She's lovely and sounds like a wonderful cat! I would describe her as a blue domestic shorthair.

Blue is a common color for cats in the United States, and doesn't indicate specific breed ancestry. Most cats are not any particular breed, and are also not "mixes" of breeds. Cats and dogs are different in this regard... mixed breed dogs actually are "mixes" of various breeds, but most cats are simply domestic cats.

The colorpoint gene, responsible for pointed coloration, originally came from the Siamese many, many years ago. At this time, the colorpoint gene is widely spread through the domestic cat gene pool, so the fact that Willow's sibling was pointed in color doesn't tell us much about breed ancestry, either. It just tells us that Willow's mother was a carrier of that gene, and possibly Willow's father (if she had the same father as the pointed kitten in her litter).

Behavior is not a reliable indication of breed ancestry for cats.

 

[Willow's Mom]

"Not Russian, she's a Blue Domestic Shorthair!" then.



Willow's caregiver knew exactly what I meant when I tried to describe this type of cat. I guess it doesn't matter that much since Willow is young and I am old so with any luck she will live long enough that I won't need another kitten for a very, very long time.

The Adventure Cat book uses colours to describe different types of cat temperaments but that doesn't really work either. Koala's sister, Wallaby, did not have the husky voice or any of the characteristic I described. She was a perfectly lovely cat, though, and although I regret being so harsh to my child when he wanted a Ragdoll and then a Sphynx, I really have done better with DSH than with purebreds.

It does sound like cat breeders have learned from the mistakes of dog breeders (or else haven't had as many hundreds of years to mess up) and that both Sphynx and Ragdoll breeds have delightful personalities as well as cute and unusual appearances.

It's fun learning about different breeds of cats even though "my" breed will always be DSH.