ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2012) —
Of course, pet owners may base their choice of animal companions on personality
but -- as with humans -- appearance may play a large part in the selection of
partner. For reasons on which the reader is free to speculate, in many human
societies curly hair represents a highly desirable trait -- Sam's song in
"Casablanca" recognizes this and generations of hairdressers have
grown rich by offering perms. So it should come as no surprise that pet owners
and animal breeders are frequently attracted by curly-haired animals. Indeed,
three curly-haired varieties of cat are already recognized and have been
developed into competitive breeds. Serina Filler at the University of
Veterinary Medicine, Vienna now shows that a fourth curly-haired breed, Selkirk
Rex, is genetically distinct from previously known breeds and presents a
genetic analysis of the new cats.
Her results are published in
the current issue of the Journal of Heredity.
In 1987, a domestic cat
rescued from a shelter in Montana, USA surprisingly gave birth to a curly-haired
kitten. The kitten ended up mating with a Persian male and giving birth to a
mixture of curly-haired and normal-haired kittens, which strongly suggested
that the mutation in the rescued cat was dominant in nature: its presence on
one of the two copies of the gene involved is sufficient to cause cats to have
curly hair. The curly-haired kittens were attractive and were soon recognized
as a new breed: the Selkirk Rex.
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