![]() ![]() The result of a Havana lying in the sun may well be a nice brown body with ginger ears and tail, and a poor Cinnamon becomes totally mottled ginger! One problem with Orientals is that they do enjoy lying in the sun, and it really does play havoc with their coats! Blacks and Blues develop rusty patches in their coats and the other colours show pale yellowish patches. So important is this deemed that Judges are instructed to withhold Certificates or First Prizes in Kitten Open Classes where the colour is ‘unsound’ or does not extend right down to the skin. It is not enough just to look at the surface of the coat and this is why Judges pull back the coat and look at the roots. The coat of the Oriental should be short and close lying and it is a requirement of all Oriental Self Breed Standards that the colour is sound to the roots, in other words extends right down to the roots. There does not appear to be any logic to the inheritance of green eye colour and parents with perfect eye colour can produce kittens of very poor eye colour and yellow-eyed parents will produce kittens with perfect eye colour! Good eye colour makes all the difference between a ‘top winner’ and an ‘also ran’. It is the aim of all breeders to breed clear green eyes, but few breeders do so with consistency. Though the Breed Standard states that the eye colour of the Oriental is green, the reality is that the eye colour of very many Orientals ranges from orange to yellow to yellowish-green and the desired clear green is seen in the minority of cats. In the Breed Standards for the Red, Cream and Apricot there is recognition of the difficulty in breeding clear green eye colour in the red series cats and the requirement is for the eyes to be ‘Any shade of green, the more vivid the better, with no flecks of contrasting colour’. The GCCF Breed Standard states that the eye colour in the Oriental should be ‘Green with no flecks of contrasting colour’, though in the Havana & Lilac this is qualified as ‘Clear, bright vivid green’. Genetically the Oriental and the Siamese are very close and visually, other than the body colour, the main difference is eye colour, for unlike the Siamese the Oriental has a green eye. With the exception of the Foreign White all Orientals are of genotype CC or Cc s and show the full expression of coat colour. In addition to the ‘coloured’ cats there is of course another ‘Self’ variety, namely the Foreign White which is of a different genetic origin, and has the blue eye colour of the Siamese, indeed genetically it is a Siamese with an additional gene for white! The second group of Orientals consists of the Torties, Smokes and Shaded – they are neither self-coloured cats nor Tabbies and the final group are the four patterns of Tabby. The Oriental Selfs are the single colour cats the Black, Blue, Havana, Lilac, Cinnamon, Fawn, Caramel and also the Red, Cream & Apricot. The GCCF divides Oriental Shorthairs into ‘Oriental Selfs’, ‘Oriental Non-Selfs other than Tabbies’, and ‘Oriental Tabbies’. ![]()
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