Eniseyka

Yasha- father of Ronny

Yasha

10kg, 96cm, 10 y.o. uncastrated male

Pomoyka

(garbage)

How many people think that cats in Krasnoyarsk live in the streets? I thought there were many when I came there, but have not seen any. The most “street cats” I have seen were the cats that lived and ate by “Stolby” National Park, restaurant, or food store. Every cat has its house. People in Siberia love cats. If a family lives in a house with yard, they most probably have around 3-4 cats there. Cats of Eastern Siberia are very similar in phenotype (except for the ones that have cats from Moscow in their background). I have never seen so many similar looking house cats before. They have their special type of head, in form of trapezium, smooth transition from forehead to nose, and strangely, most of them had semi long fur, short muscular legs, small widely set ears and green widely set apart eyes; all these local features reminded me a Siberian Race, the only problem was that many cats were castrated or were not big enough for a real Siberian.

Well, Siberian Cats were actually responsible for the trip that four crazy women from Sweden have made to Siberia. Our team consisted of regular breeders of Siberian cats, not specialists in molecular genetics or anything like that: Eva Gunnarsson, Karin Zartmann, Gunilla Wikstrom, and me (the organizer) Olga Norin. We came to Eastern Siberia with main purpose of importing “new blood” to Sweden, since all our Siberian cats are already cousins and we want to avoid inbreeding. Unfortunately, Siberian Cats are dying breed in Russia; breeds like Persian or Sphinx are more popular there (Russians love everything foreign more than their own – Russian things, that’s why they sell wood to Italy and then buy Italian Kitchens, or sell gold to Turkey and then buy Turkish jewellery, and there are many examples, but it’s another topic). I’m going to write about cats of Eastern Siberia.

It took me more then half a year to find blood that we needed. When I was looking for cats, I looked at their origin, inbreeding coefficients, and other things, with help of the Association of Siberian Cats Secretary we chose the best matching cats. There were only few owners of cats (not even breeders or catteries) in Russia left that didn’t have cats from Moscow in their pedigrees. I have to admit that even cats from Far East have famous names in their pedigrees that one can find in almost every pedigree in Europe or United States. That is why the search was so hard. The cats that we imported this time have a lot of unknown ancestors in the pedigrees, but they are needed as new lines, and I think they are much better than cats from famous Moscow or St. Petersburg catteries where average inbreeding coefficient is 20%, cats are small and have bad temper. I’m very satisfied with what we brought, all the cats have wonderful tempers and they are all good looking and healthy. Especially I have to highlight our boy black agouti with white Eniseyka, who has a 100% right temperament (as Gunilla said ;-). He is very playful, likes all the other cats in the group, he is not afraid of anything or anybody, always is happy and social, behaved best on the planes and the whole two days transferring to Sweden. And the girl with the sweetest temper – Vasilina, she came to my bed and purred for hours and hours. As soon as one lifts her up – she starts purring, very social girl, and she never was upset with any other kittens in the group, never was she scared of other cats; calmly went another direction if other cats were not happy with her presence. Vasilina and Eniseyka are our perfectly tempered cats.

When we came to Krasnoyarsk, we attracted a lot of interest from pressa and TV. Photo by Eva Gunnarsson.

The local club organized a special show for Siberian Cats where we could see their Siberians and other people could bring their cats to participate in the “new” class. The cat show was held at the local Palace of Pioneers, we had a very small hall. After advertisement of the exhibition by TV news and News Papers, we had visitors from other cities who came to watch the show, and there were 34 cats in the “new class”. Although we planned about 40 cats to be there, 120 cats were present at the show. Even after registration was over, people were still coming with their cats for recognition of the breed in the “new class”, and there were not only Siberians, but also European Short Hair cats (one of them became “best torty” of the exhibition)… The best “solid colour” became a white Siberian male with green eyes that we invited personally. When we were riding a car home, we saw a girl in the street carrying a white fluffy cat. We decided to stop, just because of interest, and look at the cat. The male was about 6-7 kg, totally matched the standard of a good Siberian, had green eyes and was very sweet and young. The girls (owners) brought him to the show and he became the best cat of Solid Colour, Best cat in New Class and our favourite (golden cat). Many house cats in Krasnoyarsk had incorrect tails; fortunately, the white one had a perfect tail.

Anyway, the exhibition was way over time, the responsible person got fired for that (but we wrote the explanation to the director with hope that the poor woman would get her job back. I haven’t heard anything back about this matter yet.)

We managed to take samples from 12 cats of different breeds for doctor Leslie Lyons, UC Davis who tries to test DNA of cats for "cscs" genes and make a geografical genetic research. We planned to take samples from about 30 cats, but the people left right after they got a certificate from a judge. I didn’t expect it to be that way because in Sweden all the participants stay until the end of the show in the evening. This way half of the cats left by 2 pm and I had to take sample from the cats that staid and waited until we had time to do it – when the show was over.

Overall, I think the exhibition attracted interest of breeders of Siberians in Russia (we went on National News as well, in the newspaper “Arguments and Facts”). I’m happy that we attracted so many owners to show their cats in the “new class”. We made good friends with breeders from Krasnoyarsk and Tyumen’. And I’ll be happy to go back again, not only as a breeder, but as a tourist or as a friend as well.