“I am an artist!” Judy Sugden declared one evening in her kitchen, in Covina, California, as she prepared supper for a couple of hundred cats. “And I have designed and built a cat.” Sugden, an architect by training, is the “grande dame of the toygers.” Since the mid-eighties, she has spent most of her time trying to concoct a cat with the temperament of a lapdog and the appearance of a tiger; it will be “small, but it looks like it could take down a gazelle.”
Sugden, a graceful sixty-six-year-old with gray hair twisted into a bun on the side of her head, was wearing a leopard-spotted blouse, with sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms crosshatched with scratch marks. She was in something of a frenzy. “I’m just running in all directions,” she said. She ground cooked chicken in a food processor, and mixed it in a giant bowl with spirulina, algae, diatomaceous earth, canned cat food, and multivitamin pills that she crushed with a pair of pliers, then put the grayish mass in the microwave. “They like it mouse temperature,” she explained.
(illustration credit 18.4)
She was flying to Cambodia the next morning, to go bird-watching with her husband (the “perennial president of our Audubon Society”), and before she left she wanted to get as many cats as possible out of her yard. Just before Christmas, Animal Control had come to warn her that Los Angeles County law permits only five cats per property, and that she was rather radically in violation. While she was away, she feared, the authorities could raid her property and make off with her life’s work. “Animal Control could walk in at any moment and take anything they want,” she said. “So I’m sending things out that I just don’t want to lose.” A dozen breeders around the world were coordinating with her. Some cats would be crated and put on planes to Europe; others would be picked up by breeders driving down from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Sugden carried the mouse-temperature mixture through a grove of palm and eucalyptus trees and began distributing it to her pride, cages of mewing felines lounging in synthetic trees or scampering around. She spoke to them in a high-pitched voice as she went. “Aren’t you just the silliest boy who ever there was?” she asked a shiny green-eyed cat. The thought of having him catnapped was alarming. “That would be devastating!” she said. “God. If he got altered and sent out as a pet?” I asked her who he was. “This one is—really soft, thick coat. That’s what we like to have.” I asked if he had a name. “Uh, no.” She laughed. “But he has a chip in him,” a way to track him down if he got loose.
Breeders like Sugden engage in unnatural selection, encouraging attributes with no evolutionary advantage. “A domestic has big eyes, wide apart, and a little tiny nose,” Sugden said. (No good.) A big cat, like a tiger or a leopard, “has small eyes, close together, and a V-shaped nose.” (Ideal, but how to get it? You can’t mate a tiger with a tabby.) Sugden’s dream cat “has a bunch of genes that are not in any small cat in the world, so I have to build those traits—spot by spot, hair by hair, squinch by squinch of the nose!” She has travelled all over the world looking for cats with traits that could contribute to the breed standard she invented. Anthony Hutcherson, who is a friend of hers, described one of her typical quests: “She was this lone white woman in India and Kashmir looking for cats, paying kids who were coming back with all kinds of creatures.”
In the yard, two cats were mating, emitting a shrill, sour sound. “The female screams because the male has spikes on his penis,” Sugden said, scooping slop into their cage. The penis of an unneutered cat has barbs all over it, like the treads you drive over when you return a rental car. These spikes abrade the female cat’s vagina, triggering ovulation. (As Carl Van Vechten put it in The Tiger in the House, feline “love habits, inspired by the hardiest desires, are often supremely cruel.”) The spiked cat penis is why it’s nearly impossible to artificially inseminate cats; it is why certain tiger populations are persistently endangered, despite human attempts at intervention; and it is why a cat breeder simply can’t get by with five cats.
Sugden places the blame for the five-cat rule on the Humane Society and on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which she thinks have undue influence on local government. “They’re all together—especially here in Los Angeles, where all the movie stars are PETA,” she said. “They believe that all animal ownership is slavery!”
(illustration credit 18.5)
In fact, PETA does not take a purely abolitionist position toward pet ownership. But there is a page on its Web site titled “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Responsible Breeder.’ ” The argument is that “producing animals for sale is a greedy and callous business in a world in which there is a critical and chronic shortage of good homes for dogs, cats, and other animals, and the only ‘responsible breeders’ are those who … get out of the business altogether.”
PETA’s concern isn’t just that the desire for fancy cats distracts attention from homeless cats. “Inbreeding causes painful and life-threatening genetic defects in ‘purebred’ dogs and cats,” the Web site says. Traits that are charming to humans can be unpleasant for the animals endowed with them. More than 80 percent of bulldog litters have to be delivered by cesarean section, because the puppies, bred to have extra-large heads, get stuck in their mothers’ birth canals. Cavalier King Charles spaniels are prone to a condition called syringomyelia, the result of their skulls’ being too small for their brains.
“I mean, God, Philip, what if he doesn’t really like Tabby Treat but is only eating it so we’ll feel less guilty?” (illustration credit 18.6)
The essential problem is that genetic changes don’t happen in isolation; every perfectly placed spot or stripe carries with it the possibility of another mutation. Inside Sugden’s house, she showed me a group of cats she called “faans.” They were cross-eyed, cow-hocked, and splayfooted, and, though you couldn’t tell from looking, many of them had hydrocephalus, a condition in which “there’s nothing in the middle of the brain except liquid.” But faans also have a trait that Sugden considers crucial for a perfected toyger: small, rounded ears, very different from a typical domestic cat’s pointy triangles.
Sugden has no human children. “I have lousy genetics, so I got myself spayed,” she told me. In fact, she is of excellent stock. She is Jean Mill’s daughter, and she came up with the idea for the toyger when she noticed some of her mother’s flawed Bengals—stripes, rather than spots. Sugden registered the toyger in 1993 with the International Cat Association, a worldwide group with five thousand members, which is the arbiter of the highly artificial standards for perfection in pedigreed cats. Building an acceptable cat isn’t easy; TICA’s breed standards are as exacting as the manual for an intercontinental bomber. At cat shows, all Abyssinians, for instance, must have gently shaped muzzles, with “no evidence of snippiness, foxy appearance, or whisker pinch.” Polydactyls—extra toes—are broadly forbidden. A recent breed called a Pixiebob is allowed to have them, but TICA maintains a strict limit of seven toes per paw. Like beauty-pageant contestants, show cats are expected to be pleasantly behaved and of high moral character; they are automatically disqualified for “showing evidence of intent to deceive.”
By the time Sugden proposed the toyger as an official breed, the Bengal had become the most popular purebred in the world. “TICA would have laughed at me and turned me away, except that my mother had just done a project that made them a hell of a lot of money,” she said. “They’ve all told me, ‘We never thought you could do it.’ ” But toygers now regularly win championship titles—beating Siamese or Abyssinians or other more established breeds—and Sugden’s best cats sell for five thousand dollars. She has deputized several dozen breeders to strive for the ultimate toyger. But they don’t always pursue her vision, either because they succeed at developing a single trait, and then, to her dismay, become satisfied with the result, or because they are out-and-out renegades. Sugden recently had a falling out with a fellow-breeder over the ideal dimensions of a toyger’s nose and legs. “She says bad things about me,” Sugden said. “And sh
e knows nothing! Her cats are ugly.”
As Sugden finished her dinner rounds, Jean Mill, a white-haired woman in blue sweatpants, came by to bid her farewell before her travels. “She’s having troubles that I never had,” Mill said. “I had a wildcat to use, so I had the genetics right there; she can’t breed from a tiger so it’s much harder. And the government’s cracking down on everything!”
But the greatest problem for breeders is their own obsession. Sugden admitted that what started as a quest had become “my addiction,” and she told me that she has gone “dead broke” pursuing it. Her breeding enterprise costs her more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and she has expended all the savings she amassed as an architect. When I visited Anthony Hutcherson, he told me that he, too, had given up a lot to have something wild in his life. “I was in a relationship that ended,” he said. “If all your free time is taken up with litter boxes, cat shows, and cat people, it can be challenging. My partner wasn’t into cats at all.” And, no matter how much he devotes himself to animals, he knows that he’ll never be completely satisfied. “What I really, really want is a cat that looks like an ocelot,” he said. “But if I were able to get one cat who had ‘it’ my next question would be, How can I get two?”
In Sugden’s kitchen, several of her “best cats” were frolicking on the floor. They were stunning: the light played on their glittery, fire-orange coats. One had flashing golden eyes; another’s were glowing green. A sassy toyger jumped up on a table and stretched out a paw to slap at Sugden’s face. “Gentle, gentle—you be very good boy,” she said, in her high-pitched cat voice. “You don’t get to play if you’re going to be rough.” The cat looked her in the eyes and kept on batting.
|2013|
(illustration credit p04.1)
EDWARD THE CONQUEROR
Fiction
* * *
ROALD DAHL
Louisa, holding a dishcloth in her hand, stepped out the kitchen door at the back of the house into the cool October sunshine.
“Edward!” she called. “Ed-ward! Lunch is ready!”
She paused a moment, listening; then she strolled out onto the lawn and continued across it—a little shadow attending her—skirting the rose bed and touching the sundial lightly with one finger as she went by. She moved rather gracefully for a woman who was small and plump, with a lilt in her walk and a gentle swinging of the shoulders and the arms. She passed under the mulberry tree onto the brick path, then went all the way along the path until she came to the place where she could look down into the dip at the end of this large garden.
“Edward! Lunch!”
She could see him now, about eighty yards away, down in the dip on the edge of the wood—the tallish, narrow figure in khaki slacks and dark-green sweater, working beside a big bonfire with a fork in his hands, pitching brambles onto the top of the fire. It was blazing fiercely, with orange flames and clouds of milky smoke, and the smoke was drifting back over the garden with a wonderful scent of autumn and burning leaves.
Louisa went down the slope toward her husband. Had she wanted, she could easily have called again and made herself heard, but there was something about a first-class bonfire that impelled her toward it, right up close so she could feel the heat and listen to it burn.
“Lunch,” she said, approaching.
“Oh, hello. All right—yes. I’m coming.”
“What a good fire.”
“I’ve decided to clear this place right out,” her husband said. “I’m sick and tired of all these brambles.” His long face was wet with perspiration. There were small beads of it clinging all over his mustache like dew, and two little rivers were running down his throat onto the turtleneck of the sweater.
“You better be careful you don’t overdo it, Edward.”
“Louisa, I do wish you’d stop treating me as though I were eighty. A bit of exercise never did anyone any harm.”
“Yes, dear, I know. Oh Edward! Look! Look!”
The man turned and looked at Louisa, who was pointing now to the far side of the bonfire.
“Look, Edward! The cat!”
Sitting on the ground, so close to the fire that the flames sometimes seemed actually to be touching it, was a large cat of a most unusual color. It stayed quite still, with its head on one side and its nose in the air, watching the man and woman with a cool yellow eye.
“Culturally, I’m a cat.” (illustration credit 19.2)
“It’ll get burnt!” Louisa cried, and she dropped the dishcloth and darted swiftly in and grabbed it with both hands, whisking it away and putting it on the grass well clear of the flames.
“You crazy cat,” she said, dusting off her hands. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Cats know what they’re doing,” the husband said. “You’ll never find a cat doing something it doesn’t want. Not cats.”
“Whose is it? You ever seen it before?”
“No, I never have. Damn peculiar color.”
The cat had seated itself on the grass and was regarding them with a superior, sidewise look. There was a veiled, inward expression about the eyes, something curiously omniscient and pensive, and around the nose a most delicate air of contempt, as though the sight of these two middle-aged persons—the one small, plump, and rosy, the other lean and extremely sweaty—were a matter of some surprise but very little importance. For a cat, it certainly had an unusual color—a pure silvery gray with no blue in it at all—and the hair was very long and silky.
Louisa bent down and stroked its head. “You must go home,” she said. “Be a good cat now and go on home to where you belong.”
The man and wife started to stroll back up the hill toward the house. The cat got up and followed, at a distance first, but edging closer and closer as they went along. Soon it was alongside them, then it was ahead, leading the way across the lawn to the house, and walking as though it owned the whole place, holding its tail straight up in the air, like a mast.
“Go home,” the man said. “Go on home. We don’t want you.”
But when they reached the house, it came in with them, and Louisa gave it some milk in the kitchen. During lunch, it hopped up onto the spare chair between them and sat through the meal with its head just above the level of the table, watching the proceedings with those dark-yellow eyes, which kept moving slowly from the woman to the man and back again.
“I don’t like this cat,” Edward said.
“Oh, I think it’s a beautiful cat. I do hope it stays a little while.”
“Now, listen to me, Louisa. The creature can’t possibly stay here. It belongs to someone else. It’s lost. And if it’s still trying to hang around this afternoon, you’d better take it to the police. They’ll see it gets home.”
After lunch, Edward returned to his gardening. Louisa, as usual, went to the piano. She was a competent pianist and a genuine music lover, and almost every afternoon she spent an hour or so playing for herself. The cat was now lying on the sofa, and she paused to stroke it as she went by. It opened its eyes, looked at her a moment, then closed them again and went back to sleep.
“You’re an awfully nice cat,” she said. “And such a beautiful color. I wish I could keep you.” Then her fingers, moving over the fur on the cat’s head, came into contact with a small lump, a little growth just above the right eye.
“Poor cat,” she said. “You’ve got bumps on your beautiful face. You must be getting old.”
She went over and sat down on the long piano bench, but she didn’t immediately start to play. One of her special little pleasures was to make every day a kind of concert day, with a carefully arranged program, which she worked out in detail before she began. She never liked to break her enjoyment by having to stop while she wondered what to play next. All she wanted was a brief pause after each piece while the audience, as it were, clapped enthusiastically and called for more. It was so much nicer to imagine an audience, and now and again while she was playing—on the lucky days, that is—the room would b
egin to swim and fade and darken, and she would see nothing but row upon row of seats and a sea of white faces upturned toward her, listening with a rapt and adoring concentration.
Sometimes she played from memory, sometimes from music. Today she would play from memory; that was the way she felt. And what should the program be? She sat before the piano with her small hands clasped on her lap, a plump, rosy little person with a round and still quite pretty face, her hair done up in a neat bun at the back of her head. By looking slightly to the right, she could see the cat curled up asleep on the sofa, and its silvery-gray coat was beautiful against the purple of the cushion. How about some Bach to begin with? Or, better still, Vivaldi. The Bach adaptation for organ of the D-Minor Concerto Grosso. Yes—that first. Then perhaps a little Schumann. “Carnaval”? That would be fun. And after that—well, a touch of Liszt for a change. One of the “Petrarch Sonnets.” The second one—that was the loveliest—the E Major. Then another Schumann, another of his gay ones—“Kinderscenen.” And lastly, for the encore, a Brahms waltz, or maybe two of them, if she felt like it.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 31
