[CAT] "Toronto Invents: The Sphynx Cat"

[rfmcdonald]

Absent Jamie Bradburn's Torontoist post, I would not have known that the notoriously hairless Sphynx breed of cat was Torontonian in origin.

It began on January 31, 1966. While local headlines focused on a winter storm that snarled traffic in suburban Toronto and killed 30 people in the United States, a momentous event was happening on Roncesvalles Avenue: a black-and-white pet cat named Elizabeth gave birth to a hairless male kitten. Named “Prune” for his wrinkled appearance, rumours of the strange cat spread. University of Toronto science student Riyadh Bawa eventually acquired the kitten and his mother.

Bawa and his mother Yania, a Siamese cat breeder, realized they could turn Prune’s mutation—the result of a recessive gene—into a new breed. Joined by fellow breeders Keese and Rita Tenhove, they mated Prune with his mother, then crossed the resulting hairless kittens with American shorthair females. Before the monicker “Sphynx” came along, the early cats bore breed names like “Moonstone” and “Canadian Hairless.”

Attempts to register the Sphinx with the Cat Fanciers Association ran into opposition during the 1970s over fears of the long-term stability of the breeding stock. At that point in time, the flow of hairless kittens was still fairly uneven, because of lost litters or males uninterested in mating. While the last traceable direct descendants of Prune and the other Bawa/Tenhove cats appear to have vanished during the 1980s, the breed survived because of the discovery of other hairless cats in Minnesota and crosses with other breeds. By the 1990s, Sphynx cats were starting to become more commonplace. Around that same time, they got a publicity boost when a hairless cat (unfortunately named Ted Nude-Gent) played Dr. Evil’s pet Mr. Bigglesworth in the Austin Powers film series. The Cat Fanciers Association accepted the breed for championship-level competition in 2002.