British Shorthair Cat

Here is a great photograph of a great looking British Shorthair Cat, a show cat. The photograph is by Helmi Flick, the best cat photographer. His name is Krystofer, a Cream Mackerel Tabby British Shorthair male kitten. Krystofer is standing on his back legs with a great expression and full of life. Fantastic capture Helmi. The great positioning has been organized/teased out by the best cat wrangler, Ken Flick, who is holding a "tease" over his head and Krystopher is very interested and dying to get to it; look at his outstretched claws ready to grab the tease.

British Short hair cat
British Shorthair cat - Krystofer - photograph is copyright Helmi Flick

A picture like this is a convergence of a lot of good things. In this instance Krystofer's face is still visible symmetrically placed between his two outstretched front legs. Helmi says that it is unusual to reach up with both paws. Usually one paw or the mouth is used and sometimes the face can be covered or the face is too high so only the chin can be seen. In order to get the capture, Helmi pre-focused. I guess this means that she can work faster, almost instantaneously, which is needed as cats move quickly.

Here is a picture of Ken Flick teasing a Bengal cat into position and directing the cat to look at the camera, while Helmi captures the moment. This is the Flicks working at a TICA show in Waxahachie.

Ken wrote an article about the Flick's journey to Japan to photograph at a cat show. Although this cat was not photographed in Japan. See the article: International cat photography. Helmi and Ken would like to do more international photography.

The British Shorthair cat breed is as old as the cat fancy itself beginning life as the classic British Moggie or mixed breed cat, that still keeps many hundreds of thousands people company and happy in England. See a history time line of the evolution of cats generally and the modern cat breeds: Cat History. And a snippet of cat history.

Here's the history summarized in a table:

Date	Event
Hundreds of years before 1871. Perhaps Roman times .	British Shorthair (BS) existed as a "domestic cat", what we now call a Moggie in the UK until the cat was turned into a formal cat breed through deliberate and selective breeding.
late 1800s	Selective breeding began
1871	Blue tabby won Best in Show at the Crystal Palace Cat Show. This was the first official cat show (I presume world wide)
1889	Written up in one of the first cat books
1918-1940s	First and Second World War Years - severe decline in number of this breed. Breeders obliged to make outcrosses with other breeds including Persian cats causing a divergence from true BS type. The GCCF no longer allows out crossing to Persians.
1901	First Brit. Shorthair exported and registered in "Americas"
c.1910	Exportation of Brit. Shorthair breed to USA
1980	CFA granted Brit. Shorthair championship status
1988	First CFA national win for this breed (3rd Best Cat in Premiership)
current	Recognized by all N.American cat associations and the GCCF in the UK
See some more on the history of this cat breed in comparison with both the American and European Shorthair cat breeds.
Read a narrative version of the history of the British Shorthair cat. See and read lots more on the British SH cat.

Starting in the late 1800s and after some 130 years of refinement by careful selective breeding we have the cat you see here. This then is a refined natural cat breed if you like. Another natural breed is the Chartreux a French cat that looks similar. The Chartreux is one of the grey cat breeds. The British Shorthair cat is extremely well established and recognized at championship status by all the major cat associations.

Krystofer (I love this name) is a mackerel tabby cat. The term "mackerel" comes from the appearance of a mackerel fish. Other tabby markings are the classic (blotchy) and spotted (think Bengal cat and Savannah cats as good examples). See a full description and some great examples of tabby cat coats on a wide range of cat breeds.

Cream is a beautiful color. It is a dilute color. Krystofer is actually a red (orange in layperson language) cat but the red color has been diluted by the presence of a dilution gene in homozygous form. This is symbolized by the lower case letters dd. This gene is positioned on the chromosome on what is called the "maltese locus". The process is also called "maltesing". This is because blue cats imported into Britain in the early days of the cat fancy were called "maltese cats. Blue is a dilution of black.

The genes dd washes out the original color (in this case red) by affecting the production of color pigment when the hair is growing for the first time. Parts of the hair are sparsely pigmented if at all.

If another gene is present, a gene called a dilute modifier (signified by letters Dm or dm) double dilution occurs and the color cream becomes apricot. Krystofer looks a bit apricot or am I seeing things?

The red color comes by way of the O gene. This is a sex linked gene and carried by the X chromosome. The presence of this gene changes the production of black pigmentation (the substance is called eumelanin) to orange pigment (a substance called phaeomelanin). The full genotype of the cream cat is ddOOdmdm.

A classic color for the British Shorthair cat is gray or in cat fancy language "blue" meaning blue/gray. Two of the kittens below are blue British Shorthair cats. The two in the middle are blue and white or have solid and white cat coats. The blue color is a dilution of of black. The full genotype of the blue cat is aaBBdd dmdm, where aa is the recessive non-agouti gene, represents the Browning gene, Bdd is homozygous dilution genes and dm the modifier

British Shorthair kittens - photograph copyright Helmi Flick. To see this image in very large format please click this link: British Shorthair cats kittens or the image.

The cat associations allow a very wide range of coat colors for the British Shorthair cat. The coat is dense and cracks when the cat moves. The Flick's black British SH has a fantastic black coat that feels great. He is called NOX. They also live with a blue British Shorhair cat called SKY, a very sweet and classic looking British SH. You can see Ken and Helmi Flick's cats by clicking on this link.

This cat has a strong body and a very thick coat. The breed is considered placid and quiet and can put on weight as she may become too static. Plenty of opportunity to exercise then. There is a rare cat breed called the Lowlander in the USA and the Britanica by the European Group Cat Association (EGCA), which is a semi-long haired version of the British SH. This cat forms the basis for many cat breeds in the USA including the Selkirk Rex.

As to health this cat like some other purebred cats and non-purebred cats may have a predisposition to acquire the diseases: