Foothills Felines Cat Show

The official flyer for the show

August 3, 2014 Sunday (about events on the day before)

Yes, I went to another cat show. No, I'm not addicted to cat shows and I don't plan to start showing my cats (Apricot would hate it and I'm not about to do all the grooming preparation you have to do for the Maine Coons, whenever they arrive). Now I've got the obligatory protesting out of the way ...

But Mrs. McFadden (who I'm getting the kittens from) was going to be there, and well, it wasn't that far away. So it was nice to go say hi again, see the cats she'd brought, and this time I brought money to buy cat stuff from the vendors. Here's a tip for you: you can find stuff at cat shows you can't find anywhere else, and the stuff you can find elsewhere is cheaper at the show. I got two braided rug cat beds and in the online store they were ten dollars more each!

Also, this time I asked more questions and found out a little bit more about how a cat show works. I will share my hard-earned wisdom with you. (Tee hee.) And if CFA or someone who actually shows cats tells you different, blame me, I misunderstood something!

Okay, there are like eight or ten judges at a show. Each judge sees all the cats, as far as I could tell, and each judge issues his or her own winner, second, third, down to tenth place cat for (I think) the "Best of Breed" category. There are other categories, like "Best of Color" but I don't think they get ribbons. And that's where it stops. I rather expected each judge's top pick to go up against all the other top picks and then they have to reach a consensus, but since upon examination that idea does seem a bit silly (why would any of them change their minds?) it makes sense that each judge is on their own, so to speak.

I don't know if the judges at the other cat show were doing this, but the two I watched here were actually explaining for the layperson what they were doing and how things worked, so along with asking questions, I got a bit explained by the judges themselves.

Here she is getting the brown tabby Maine Coon girl to stretch out.

For instance, they don't put two intact males next to each other. So each cat that is registered for the show has a number, and each number is printed on either blue or pink paper, so they can make sure at a glance that the boys are always separated by at least one girl.

Also, there are four classes of cat, and no single cat can be in multiple classes. There's Household Pets, which is just your regular rescued or adopted cat (that'd be where Apricot would be); Premiership, which is where Pippin would have been--these are cats with papers and lineage that are a certain breed of cat, but are fixed cats; and the rest of them, the intact breed cats, get split into two groups: kittens, which is 4-8 months, and everybody else called Championships. I guess the kitten version is Kitten Championship. So each one of those four groups gets a "first place cat" from each judge.

But here's where I think it goes weird. The breeds compete against each other. So you can have a Siamese and a Persian and a Maine Coon and a British Shorthair all in the same ring, all in Championship, and only one gets the first place cat from that judge. What they're doing is: the first place cat is the one who matches their own breed description the best. So while they're competing against each other, they're also sort of not. 

At this point I kind of shrugged and gave up.

There was a new type of cat there, a Chinese LiHau ('lee-wah') which was cool to see, even though it looked to me like just another alley cat! But apparently they are only available in China and the USA, and it was extremely difficult to get them out of China to here. I know what I'm paying for my Maine Coon kittens, and I shudder to think what it would cost to get even one of these babies, since they're so rare! (No, I didn't get a picture of the one at the cat show. But the link takes you to the CFA page about them, and there are pictures there.)

See there at the top? She's just brushed his hair
backwards with her hand and that spray of
white is the underside of his coat!

One judge also demonstrated a "blue silver" Maine Coon for us. Blue is the color gray, and silver means that at the base of the hair, the hair is white. She ruffled his fur backwards, and it was amazing. Silver is sometimes hard to see (like a cream silver; there's not much difference) but this cat had dark solid gray so when she fluffed his hair back it was like a white spotlight. And you can be assured, since this was a Maine Coon, it wasn't skin color we were seeing; their hair is too thick for that!

The other judge I sat and watched.
She's holding and explaining a silver ocicat kitten.

This here (above) is an Ocicat. They have spots, like miniature leopards. But they're related to the whole Siamese / Abyssinian branch of cat-hood, which means they are little athletes and love to bounce off the walls continuously. I think the Ocicats are beautiful, but I definitely don't want one!

A Selkirk Rex

I came across a curly coated cat having a nap in his cubicle. Or her cubicle. The people he belongs to weren't around to ask questions of. I took a picture of him in particular because I'd never seen a Selkirk Rex except in pictures... which doesn't help you any, now does it? It only occurred to me today that this picture was vaguely ironic.

He's only two years old.

Now. This is a two year old male Maine Coon. She's showing the blockiness of his head. They're supposed to have rather square heads. But just look how big he is! And he's not done growing, although I don't think he'll get much taller. I'm thinking my two are going to make Apricot look like a permanent kitten, since your brain always calibrates "normal" to the majority of what you see (two big vs one small will make the big ones look normal and the small one look abnormally tiny). It occurs to me also that I may have to watch Apricot's weight a bit more closely than the other two due to this--if Apricot started getting fat I might not notice since in comparison he wouldn't be that big!

I'm counting on the lazy laidback factor of the Maine Coon personality to keep my house the right size for them. I think I wouldn't have a big enough house for a cat that size who was bouncing off the walls. I mean I know the kittens will bounce off the walls, but they aren't that size yet. 

Buttercup, the cat(s) who play Rion in the Hunger Games

I haven't seen the first Hunger Games movie, and have no intention of seeing it, or the second, but apparently in the second movie there's a cat, who is played by two cats, both of whom were at the cat show for the celebrity draw of it. The lady in red is their person, and the one closest to us is the one that you see the most on the movie. He was a show cat until he was in the movie, and now he won't behave in the ring. She said it was like he's a movie cat now, he can't be bothered with the little cat shows!

He's a Maine Coon as well, and it's good they have a laidback personality. Notice he has two full ears. In the movie, he doesn't; one of them is missing. They did this by taping the one ear down. I'm sure they will also CGI some raggedy edges on the missing ear, but taping it down means they don't have to computer-remove the entire ear from every single frame.

I can't imagine most cats would take kindly to that, however! But apparently Buttercup not only put up with it, but also performed on cue. The lady is talking to a woman with a local news (channel not specified) video camera doing an interview with her, and I just listened in.

Yeah, they have a cop there, just in case anybody tried anything stupid. Isn't that kind of sad? I mean, you have to have someone to protect any movie star, even if it's "only" a cat?

Oh, yes, the fact that there are two of them. Buttercup (the one in front with his butt to us) did all the running around scenes; the other one did all the lying down scenes. There are evidently more running around scenes. I think it's funny that they are demonstrating just why they were cast in that order!

And I shopped, and found more of the rattle mice that Mrs. McFadden gave me one and it's Apricot's favorite mouse ever so if he loses his, I have more! 

I also got a different brand of catnip in a fish shaped cloth toy. Now the lady I got the braided beds from has rehabilitated feral cats, and she said I should probably not put the catnip that comes with the beds into them, as sometimes the more anxious cats don't need the extra "edge" that catnip can give them. I was very glad she told me that.

When I got home and presented Apricot with the fish toy, he actually reacted to it. He hadn't reacted to the other catnip toys I have, but I thought that might be because some of them are old and some of them are "generic" catnip--ie, I bought them at Petsmart or the grocery store--and sometimes generic catnip isn't the right strain of catnip for certain cats.

This seems to be the case with Apricot, but he also got a lot more edgy and aggressive after sniffing and playing with the fish for a few minutes. Of course, you have to understand that by more aggressive I mean he might have attempted to nibble my fingers once or twice more than the usual once or twice. Apricot's such a sweetie that it's hard to get him at all what I would consider aggressive. But he was also restless and edgy, and didn't seem like he was having a fun time.

So I took the fish away. He'd abandoned it shortly after starting to play with it, and couldn't settle down to any toy, like he had to do something but he didn't know what. He didn't care that I'd absconded with the fish. I put it in a plastic bag and will donate it to the cause of hopefully making my friend's cat run around a little more (Pumpkin loves catnip of all sorts, and is a little on the chubby side). 

I got out the Bird wand toy to try to wear off some of the nervous energy the catnip had bestowed upon poor Apricot. Unfortunately at this point it was after sunset, so to play without stepping on him, I had to turn on all the lights, and he kept getting distracted by both the catnip'd feeling and by the reflections in the glass. He wouldn't go in the pink room at all.

He's back to his normal sweet self today, however, none the worse for wear. That's the good thing about catnip. Even if your cat reacts badly to it, it wears off with no side effects (that humans have ever been able to tell, anyway).

But if Miss Paws hadn't told me about ferals and that type of adverse reaction to catnip, I probably wouldn't have realized what happened. Now I know. No catnip for Apricot!