“So what we needed to do was actually breed the playfulness in. “I would say it’s exactly the opposite because the Asian leopard cat is a timid little thing (when people are around),” she says. This playfulness, however, is not bred of a muted ferocity handed down from their wild forebears, Hill says. They like to play with everything that’s there to play with.” “They’ll throw their litter all over the floor and their food all over the floor. Not only do the male cats insist on marking the premises with nose-searing urine spray, but many Bengals will use their litter, or anything else at their disposal, as projectiles, she says.
Mopping in a Bengal cattery is a grinding chore - so much so that it helps force many breeders out of the business after two or three years, says Hill, who has been at for most of two decades. And you do an awful lot of mopping,” Hill says. I’ll be mopping the floor and I’ll have a 10-week-old kitten straddling (the mop) and riding it. While the cats can boast an undoubted beauty - and high fun quotients - they have also raised concerns with some experts who fear for the lives of the breeding stock animals and the safety of the hybrids’ owners.īut at first glance - and glances are all you get as they dart and dive from view - what’s not to love? “They’re beautiful cats, if you’ve seen them, you’ll know why their (popularity) is growing,” she says. The Savannah, a much newer breed, has some 1,700 cats registered with the association, the cat equivalent of the American Kennel Club. The cats, which have been bred since the early 1980s, now number more than 98,000 registrations with TICA - by far the most out of the 56 breeds the group recognizes. Indeed, the Bengals have been the most registered breed of cat in the world for eight years running, says Leslie Bowers, business manager of The International Cat Association, or TICA. They are also catching the eye of more and more cat lovers.Īlong with Savannah cats - a mix between domestic felines and African Servals - the Bengals are bringing a jolt of the jungle into tens of thousands of North American homes. “They should expect a lot of excitement pretty much for the lifetime that cat is with you. this is not the breed for them,” Hill says. Something like this spotted young male that is peering down from the fluorescent light fixture, more than two metres up from the floor in Heather Hill’s crazy house of a cattery near Uxbridge - a perch he gained in one, effortless leap.Īnd he, along with the four other juveniles leaping and yowling in the big room at Hill’s Canicspots breeding operation, is a genetic mixture of the domestic feline and the Asian leopard - a small but ferocious beast found in a variety of sizes and habitats from the Philippines to Afghanistan. They can contour and calm and gentle the creatures into something you might even allow into your living room. They say a leopard can’t change its spots.īut through careful, painstaking breeding, humans can soften them a bit. There’s no curling up with a book with them.”Ĭurator of reproduction programs and research at the Toronto Zoo
“They are known to be less predictable, definitely more temperamental than domestic cats.