One thing I remember about growing up in West Virginia were the large numbers of tailless and short-tailed cats that frequented the barns and fields. My grandmother had a tailless tortie that was bred by her 17 year old ginger tom. Old Morris must’ve been fertile, for she queened a litter of six little kittens. Four were short-tailed or tailless. Two had tails.
These cats were always called Manx cats, though they were obviously never registered. I don’t know whether their roots were truly from the Isle of Man or not.
I remember traveling down an isolated country lane last summer, and at every farmhouse, there was a least one tailless or short-tailed cat.
As far as I know, not many people in this part of the state are of Manx heritage. Most people are Scottish, Scots-Irish, German, German Swiss, Dutch, and Welsh, but maybe some family from the Isle of Man brought a few cats here.
I know that these cats have the same genes as the true Manx cats, because they very often have Manx cat sydrome and have trouble with their bladder and bowels. (I had to give an enima to a Manx kitten with this problem a few years ago. Not a pretty sight!)
These cats are great mousers. Their renown may have led some farmer in West Virginia to import them from Man. Supposedly, the fact that they don’t have a tail to wag. When cats stalk mice outside their holes, they wag their tails. This wagging supposedly alerts the mice to their presence, and cat without a tail to wag won’t alert the mice.
I don’t know whether this is true or not, but cats with short tails or no tails seem to be good mousers.
It is thought that the tailless and short-tailed cats of Reerso, Denmark are of Manx ancestry.
Perhaps the West Virginia cats are, too.
All of these cats the result of the founder effect. The founders of cat populations in Man, Reerso, and West Virginia were all tailless or short-tailed. These cats were supported by the local population and bred, producing generations of cats with those short tails and tailles rumps.
So closely associated with this part of West Virginia are these cats that I once read a letter in a West Virginia paper claiming that Manx cats come from West Virginia! “Manx” doesn’t register as coming from a foreign country.
They don’t, come from here, but they sure are common.
FWIW, Manx cats must be crossed with other cats, they suffer from a deadly genetic fault, that kills Manx to Manx breedings.
I forgot to put that in there.
Breeding Manx + Manx is what make those awful ‘Twisty Cats’ that some people breed on purpose, right?
I don’t know.
I do know cat people tend to be more likely to throw fits about unusual body type than we dog people are.
The munchkin cat is a controversy in catdom, as is the Manx, because of Manx cat syndrome.
Yet we dog people breed dwarfs and dogs with brachyury all the time.
I have a stub tailed cat that may have bred with her wild father in the woods and produced 3 with no tails and a twisty cat. Is this part if the genetics? It appears to be a possibility.
The short tail is a dominant gene. However, you have to use those with tails to produce them. That’s why my grandmother’s cat had kittens with tails. She was carrying the gene for tails, and the ancient orange tom had a tail.
When you say “wild father,” you mean a domestic cat that lives wild, right? Bobcats may be able to interbreed with domestic cats, but the Pixie-Bob breed doesn’t have bobcat in it.
But my cousin had a large long-haired cat that looked very much like a bobcat.
good info. great job