pangur-and-grim:

pleisto-cene:

followthebluebell:

nimthecat:

followthebluebell:

let me tell you about Kiki. 

When I was 7 years old and at the optometrist, I was what’s known as a Little Shit.  I didn’t sit still.  I didn’t want to read the letters.  I didn’t want to do anything except go home.  Eventually, my mom bribed me with a kitten.  A PERSIAN kitten, freshly purchased from the extremely shady pet shop directly across the street.  It worked like a charm, I’m sad to say, because I’m extremely vulnerable to kittens.  tbh, considering the way my mom was looking at those kittens, she would have bought one anyway.

My dad says that she always did have a weakness for dumb animals.  “It’s why she married me,” he always says.  Anyway, this is a story about a Very Dumb Cat, not Heterosexual Hilarity Hour.

This kitten weighed about a pound and I suspect 75% of that was fluff.  She was smokey grey, had a perfect little nose (she was what’s called a doll-faced or traditional Persian.  No pug faces here!), and had the IQ of a hammer. 

I mean this with all the love in my heart, but you could just look into those eyes and absolutely KNOW that there was nothing going on in there.   It wasn’t even a case of ‘no lights on upstairs’.  There wasn’t even an upstairs.  There wasn’t even a ground floor.  There was just NOTHING going on in there. 

Kiki didn’t understand some simple concepts—-stairs, for example.  She never figured them out, even after 7 years of living in a house with stairs.  Her preferred method of locomotion was to cry very loudly until someone carried her where she wanted to go.  One could argue that this was, in fact, very clever of her.

Please don’t give her the credit.  It was pretty clear that she was simply confused about how stairs could go up AND down at the same time.

TBH, she never figured out how to get onto furniture either.  She was fully capable of jumping and playing like any other cat, but it seemed as soon as she had to THINK about something, everything else shut down.  Like… one day, I was playing with her and a piece of string.  She was delighted and jumping and playing.  Just normal kitten stuff.  Then she decided she wanted to sit in my lap instead.  I mean, i SAY “decided”, but it could’ve just been a passing air mote depositing the idea in her head.

The point is, she abruptly forgot how to jump onto furniture.  She forgot how to JUMP.  She just kinda sat there and stared at me for a few seconds before starting to cry.   She was actually pretty distressed by it and didn’t stop until I picked her up for a cuddle.  Thankfully, she seemed to forget it pretty quickly.  No room for anything besides the moment, I guess.

She also never grew very much.  Even as an adult, she barely pushed 3 pounds.  She also had a serious dental issue.  Her canines stuck straight out horizontally.  They weren’t very big so they didn’t push past her lips or anything, but it was the most baffling thing her vet had ever seen.

I loved that dumb animal.  She was a very good girl and I miss her.

Actually, full bred persian cats are… very stupid. As in negative IQ points.

Honestly? Accurate. Kiki was just especially dim even for a persian cat. Like she started off with a breed handicap and just went lower.

Here’s a paper:

It’s apparently a result of their head shape- we tend to focus on the flat faces of ultra typed Persians and forget their entire skulls are rounded and compacted compared to a normal cat’s. There’s not enough room up there for regular brain development, so they tend to be a bit lacking in a myriad of areas. Persians with longer faces can still wind up dim witted if other parts of their head are still squished in.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5598898/

Here’s a paper! I’ll find more when not at work.

YIKES I just read through & those results are quite damning. it should be common sense that deforming the head so severely would damage the brain, but it honestly never occurred to me. no wonder the Germans use Persians as the poster-child for ‘torture breeding’