Feline Purr-Fection On View
The winners of a major cat championship graced the set of The Early Show Monday, as the head of a big cat lover's group explained exactly what sets these cats a breed apart.
The cats competed over the weekend in the Cat Fanciers' Association-Iams championship, at New York's Madison Square Garden.
In first place was "Cobbie," a Bluepoint Siamese owned by John Robins. The runner-up was "Lance," a Scottish Fold Shorthair owned by Bonnie Malick. And in third place was "Wiley," an American Wirehair owned by Dr. Virginia Wight.
CFA Chairman Allen Scruggs
The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen the most common question about cat show judging is just what makes a cat a champion."The answer," he replied, "is that each breed — there are 41 recognized Cat Fanciers' Association breeds — has a standard of excellence, a description of what the perfect cat of that breed would look like. And the closer it gets to that standard, the more beautiful we think that that cat is."
Top cat Cobbie won an "unbelievably prestigious honor," Scruggs says.
Though Cobbie's eyes appear gray to "a lot of people who aren't in the cat fancy … (they are) blue, because it's a dilute gene of black."
A Siamese hasn't won best cat in many years, he added, though they "once were the most popular breed."
Lance, Scruggs noted, is a representative of a "very affectionate breed of cat, a very appealing and soft and cuddly kind of cat" who gets his name because of his folded ears. … The mutation that created the ears like that happened in Scotland many years ago."
As for Wiley, who came in third, he reminds many people of Morris the Cat, of cat-food advertising fame.
But he's not the same type of cat, Scruggs points out: "This is a breed that was developed in the United States and literally found in a barn. … A very well known CFA judge found them and put the breed on the map. … The cats are just as adorable as they look. They look like household cats in a lot of respects to lots of people, except they have a distinctive, Brillo-type of coat. … And are very sweet cats also."
New to the show this year was a feline agility competition, measuring the speed with which the cats can go through 11 challenges. The first winner was a Japanese Bobtail.