German Rex
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 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (October 2008) |
| German Rex | |
|---|---|
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| Origin | German Democratic Republic |
| Breed standards | |
| FIFe | standard |
| Domestic cat (Felis catus) | |
German Rex is a breed of domestic cat. They are a medium sized, breed with slender legs of a medium length. The head is round with well developed cheeks and large, open, ears. The eyes are of medium size in colours related to the coat colour. The coat is silky and short, with a tendency to curl. The whiskers also curl, though less strongly than in the Cornish Rex and they may be nearly straight. All colours of coat, including white, are allowed. The body development is heavier than the Cornish Rex - more like the European Shorthairs. A German Rex cat is very friendly and quickly makes contact with its owner. It is lively, playful and intelligent. It is the master of all acrobatic tricks, which it repeats again and again with huge enjoyment. Its temperament is much the same as a Cornish Rex.
German Rex breeding was in the doldrums in the mid-70's, but there is now a group of keen breeders in Germany, Finland, Switzerland, Russia, Denmark and Holland that are re-establishing the breed.
An early Rex-type cat from Germany was Kater Munk, a cat of the family of one Erna Schneider, that was born 1930 or 1931 in a village near then-Königsberg, German Reich (today's Kaliningrad, Russia). Munk was the son of a mahogany[verification needed] Angora cat and a Russian Blue. There were one (some sources say two) other curly cat(s) in the litter which was castrated early. Munk spread his genes plentifully among the village's cat population till his death in 1944 or 1945. The Schneiders valued the strong tom with a penchant for catching fish from the family's garden pond for himself, not for his curly coat; he was, it seems, referred to colloqially as a Preußig Rex ("Prussian Rex", in local[verification needed] dialect). German Rex researchers do not consider Kater Munk to be related to the German Rex breed [1] and state that he was never bred.
Munk (left) and Lämmchen (right)
In the summer of 1951, a doctor in Berlin-Buch (Pankow borough), Rose Scheuer-Karpin, noticed a black curly-coated cat in the Hufelandklinik hospital garden. The clinic's personnel told her that they had known the cat since 1947. The doctor named the cat Lämmchen (German for "little lamb"). Her supposition that she must be the result of a mutation, was shown to be correct. Thus Lämmchen was the first breeder-owned rex type cat and the maternal ancestor of all the current German Rex.
The first two German Rex deliberately bred were two rex kittens from a 1957 litter of four, offspring of Lämmchen and the straight-coated son Fridolin she had with a stray black tom Blackie adopted by Scheuer-Karpin. Lämmchen died on December 19, 1964 or in 1967, indicating she had been very young when first sighted in 1947. She left a number of Rex and hybrid descendants - the last one of her offspring was born in 1962 - most of which were used to improve other breeds such as the Cornish Rex which was suffering from skin problems due to being descended from genetically impoverished thoroughbred stock. In 1968, the lineage hinged on the efforts of the GDR cattery vom Grund who acquired the last 3 Rex offspring of Lämmchen not sold abroad, and amplified the lineage with European Shorthair and mixed-breeds. A stock was established in the West through the efforts of the FRG von Zeitz cattery in 1973 which in the previous year had acquired their sample of the allele with the white female hybrid Silke vom Grund. After some years, the breed slowly became more plentiful.
It is easy to see why Scheuer-Karpin would call her cat Lämmchen.
It is not certainly known how Lämmchen relates to Munk, only that the German Rex mutation - on the same gene as in the Cornish Rex - is recessive, meaning it will only show when both alleles are "rex", and that Munk is the first thoroughly documented rex cat, though as stories of "children cuddling curly coated kittens"[citation needed] attest, rex alleles turn up every now and then. Presumably, Munk sired many offspring with local cats, none of which would have had curly fur as the allele of Munk's straight-haired mates would dominate. In the following years, any curly-haired cats in the Königsberg area went unnoticed or at least were not bred on purpose; the allele nonetheless would have stood good chances to remain in the local cat population, as recessive alleles have a very low probability to disappear entirely.
It is highly probable that Lämmchen was a grand- or great-granddaughter of Munk; Germans fleeing or emigrating from East Prussia at the end of World War II would have at least tried to take beloved pets with them, and with these, Munk's genetic legacy could have arrived in Berlin. The outskirts of Germany's largest city would seem a natural place for many refugees to wind up eventually, and despite the impossibility to prove that the German Rex lineage goes back to Munk, between 1947 and the birth of the first Cornish Rex Kallibunker at Bodmin Moor (England) in 1950, Lämmchen was the only Rex cat documented to exist anywhere in the world. Indeed, it turned out eventually that Lämmchen had belonged to a male nurse who arrived in Berlin around 1945 from his native Königsberg.
Another Rex cat turned up in Berlin-Buch, apparently in the late 1950s. The tom named Schnurzel eventually contributed to German Rex breeding; it is not known how he related to Lämmchen but presumably he was a grandson of hers, as Scheuer-Karpin would let her cats roam free through the gardens and forests of Buch. Even in more recent times, the genetic legacy of Lämmchen if not Munk manifests itself on occasion in the Berlin area, such as Pumina, found as a stray in 1992 some 14 km (9 miles) from the old Hufelandklinik grounds. The lineage of Preuss from Siegburg which turned up in 1979 in the Rhineland town of Siegburg does not appear to be related to be a German Rex proper; it is almost certainly not related to Lämmchen. Nonetheless, his descendants may have contributed to the German Rex lineage of today.
References
- Batchelor, Anthony (2006): The revival of the German Rex. PawAcademy article.
- Jaenicke, Ilona (2007): Die Geschichte der German Rex [in German]. Version of 2007-JUN-04. Retrieved 2007-AUG-15.
- Rex & Sphynxklubben: The German Rex History. Retrieved 2007-AUG-15.