The Age of Cats by Jonathan B. Losos

Author:Jonathan B. Losos [B. Losos, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-04-14T12:00:00+00:00

A FEW YEARS BEFORE SAUSMAN embarked on her project, another Southern Californian hatched a similar plan to create a miniature version of nothing less than the largest cat in the world, the tiger.

That Judy Sugden had such a grand vision is no surprise. Like Sausman, she’s artistic, though in a different way. An architect by training, she was imaginative enough to envision new creations and organized enough to figure out how to make them happen. Sugden also had a predisposition that Sausman didn’t have. Jean Mills, the woman who created the Bengal, was her mother. As a result, Sugden had grown up sculpting new cats, and if her mom had made a little leopard, wasn’t a tiny tiger the logical next step? Sugden’s goal was simple. Combine the essence of the tiger—big-boned and powerful, orange with black stripes—with the character of the domestic cat—friendly.

Creating a tiger-striped domestic cat was more of a challenge than you might expect. Orange cats exist, and mackerel tabbies have vertical black stripes. You’d think all you’d need to do is mate the two to combine the traits.

But there’s a catch. The allele that produces orange affects all the markings on a cat, not just the background color. Orange mackerel tabbies exist, but their stripes are not black, just a darker shade of orange.[7] Garfield fans take note—your idol is a biological impossibility.

And there’s a second difficulty. Tabby stripes have a different arrangement than tiger stripes. Tabby striations are very linear, like bars in a jail cell. By contrast, the tiger pattern is more of an interbraiding of stripes originating from the midline of the back with others coming up from the belly. Moreover, some of these stripes branch, and some of the branches then come back together, forming enclosed spaces.[8] Tony the Tiger fans take note—your favorite cereal spokesman has domestic cat, rather than tiger, striping.

Sugden’s playbook for creating the Toyger—as the new breed was inelegantly named—was very much the same as Sausman’s. She started with a Bengal with three important traits—a tan coat, thick bones, and a loving disposition—and bred him with a stray mackerel tabby with prominent stripes. As the project proceeded, cats with other tiger-like features were carefully added to the mix. The inclusion many years later of a Bengal with rosettes was particularly important because Sugden figured—correctly, it turns out—that the genes for rosettes might combine with those for mackerel tabby markings to produce elongated rosettes resembling branching tiger stripes (Bengals with rosettes didn’t exist when the project started). She also added cats with slightly warmer, “orangier” tones, eventually getting the color she wanted without using the allele that typically produces orange color in housecats. Generation after generation, she chose the offspring that had the best features and kept on breeding them, getting closer, “squinch by squinch,” to the look for which she was aiming.

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