[CAT] "Living-Room Leopards"

[rfmcdonald]

Ariel Levy's latest article in The New Yorker is in the current issue of that magazine. Free only to New Yorker online subscribers or owners of the actual physical copy of the magazine, it's a fascinating look at the world of cat breeders who are trying to breed pet cats that have as exotic a look as possible, the "living-room leopards" of the title. Levy takes on this culture, which seems to have something of the obsessive to it, concerned with producing a particular look regardless of the cost to the breeders or indeed to the often-inbred animals themselves.

(Myself, I wouldn't want a wild cat, in look or in appearance. I'm glad that Shakespeare's less than ten pounds. He's still adorable.)

When Anthony Hutcherson was a little boy, what he wanted most was something wild. But he was growing up in a very tame place: Helen, Maryland, a small farming community named after the postmaster’s daughter. “I wanted a kinkajou and a monkey and a skunk, a pet leopard,” he recalled—something unlike the cows and sheep out in the meadow. One day, when he was ten years old, waiting with his mother to check out at the grocery store, he saw something that thrilled him. It was a picture in Cat Fancy of a pretty woman in California, holding an exotic golden cat that she’d bred by crossing a domestic shorthair with an Asian leopard cat—a foul-tempered little beast with a gorgeous spotted coat. She called the result the Bengal, and touted it as “a living room leopard.”

His family didn’t understand his passion, he told me one recent afternoon. Hutcherson, who is African-American, offered a cultural explanation: “Generally, black people don’t like cats.” So he wrote to the woman in California, Jean Mill, and, to his delight, she wrote back. They have been friends and collaborators ever since. Hutcherson, now thirty-eight, is the chairman of the International Cat Association’s Bengal Breed Committee and a past president of the International Bengal Cat Society. He and Mill, like many of their colleagues, share a dream: to breed a cat that “looks like it just walked out of the jungle.”

We were sitting in Hutcherson’s living room, in Aquasco, Maryland, across from a glass cage where his kinkajou, a ferret-like nocturnal creature, was sleeping under a blanket. Hutcherson works as an event producer, and also runs a cattery, called JungleTrax, out of his house. When I visited, he had half a dozen sleek Bengal kittens, coppery creatures with well-defined dark spots—“rosettes,” in cat-fancier parlance. As we talked, he flung a cat toy in the air, and they leaped after it with astounding speed. Several times, they scratched us as they went by, so Hutcherson decided to trim their nails, holding the scruff of their neck in his mouth while he clipped. “When I’m gardening or mowing the grass, they all come outside with me,” he said. “And they really do look like little leopards. It’s really rewarding and humbling when you forget the bead of time, and you are watching a cat chase a bug up a tree—two thousand years ago, somebody probably watched a cat that looked like a leopard chase a bug. It is beautiful and transcendent.”