Breed Profiles

You are at a cat show, or scrolling through photos, and you stop on a lean golden cat covered in dark thumbprint spots, with a wild alert face and long legs. Your first thought is that somewhere back there is a jungle cat. Everyone has that thought. With the Ocicat it is completely wrong, and the wrongness is the whole point of the breed.

There is no wildcat anywhere in the Ocicat pedigree. Not one generation, not far back, not diluted. Every ancestor is a domestic cat. The spots were built out of ordinary domestic genetics, and that is what separates this breed from the hybrid cats it gets mistaken for. A Bengal traces back to the Asian leopard cat, an actual wild species crossed into domestic lines. Ocicats have nothing of the kind. If you like the spotted look but are uneasy about hybrid origins, or you live somewhere with restrictions on cats of wild descent, this distinction is not trivia. It is the reason the breed exists in the form it does.

It also happened by accident. In 1964 an American breeder named Virginia Daly was trying to produce an Abyssinian-pointed Siamese. She crossed an Abyssinian with a Siamese, bred a daughter of that pairing back to a Siamese, and among the resulting litter was an ivory kitten with golden spots. Her own daughter looked at him and said he resembled an ocelot. The kitten was called Tonga, and he was neutered and sold as a pet, because he was not what anyone had been aiming for. Only afterwards, when a geneticist pointed out the value of a spotted domestic cat, was the cross repeated deliberately. American Shorthair was brought in later, adding silver colours and more substance to the body. So the recipe is Abyssinian, Siamese and American Shorthair, three thoroughly domestic breeds, and the spotting comes from the agouti ticking of the Abyssinian being rearranged by the tabby genetics underneath.

The spots are the standard's obsession. They should be thumbprint shaped, well scattered over the body rather than lined up in stripes, with a target-like pattern on the shoulder and rings that break up on the legs and tail. The face keeps the tabby M and the darker eye markings. There are twelve recognised colours, from the classic tawny through chocolate, cinnamon, blue, lavender, fawn and the silver versions of each. The coat is short, satiny and close-lying, needing almost nothing beyond a rub with your hand and the occasional brush.

Underneath the coat is an athletic cat. Medium to large, surprisingly heavy when you pick one up, all muscle and long leg. They are climbers and jumpers of the highest order and they will find the top of every cupboard in your home within a week. Tall cat trees, secured shelves, and an acceptance that nothing on a high surface is truly safe.

And now the part that genuinely defines living with one. Ocicats are absurdly social. The comparison people reach for is a dog, and for once the comparison is fair rather than lazy. They follow you between rooms. They meet you at the door. They want to be involved in whatever you are doing, including things that do not need involving. Many learn to fetch, walk on a harness, and respond to their names properly rather than in the vague way most cats do. They are quick to train and quick to invent games. Guests are treated as arriving entertainment rather than intruders.

That sociability comes with a cost, and any honest breeder will say so before taking your money. An Ocicat left alone all day is a miserable animal. They do not do stoic solitude. They form very strong attachments to their people and they show separation stress through yowling, destructive behaviour, litter tray problems and obsessive attention-seeking when you return. If your household is empty from eight until seven, this is the wrong breed, or at the very least you should be getting two so they have each other. Many breeders will insist on a pair or a resident cat for exactly this reason.

They are also vocal, and that comes straight from the Siamese side. Not usually the full foghorn of a Siamese, but a talkative cat with a large repertoire of chirps, trills, and running commentary. They will tell you when the food bowl is at an unacceptable level. They will discuss your absence at length. If silence is a requirement in your home, look elsewhere.

Health is reasonably good, helped by the wide gene pool from three founding breeds, but there are things to check. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy occurs and breeders should be screening their breeding cats by echocardiogram with a cardiologist, repeatedly over the cat's life rather than once as a kitten. Pyruvate kinase deficiency, inherited from the Abyssinian side, causes anaemia and has a straightforward DNA test, so there is no excuse for a breeder not knowing the status of both parents. Progressive retinal atrophy, also Abyssinian in origin, likewise has a test. Renal amyloidosis has been reported in related lines. Ask for the paperwork, all of it, and be wary of anyone selling spotted kittens cheaply with no test results, because there are plenty of those and the spots alone tell you nothing about what is underneath.

Expect a well-bred one to live comfortably into its mid teens.

The summary is a slightly odd one. You are buying a cat that looks like something that should be stalking through undergrowth, and you are getting an animal that would rather sit on your keyboard and shout at you about it. That gap between appearance and personality is the joke at the centre of the breed, and Ocicat people find it endlessly funny. If you want a decorative, self-sufficient cat that suits your interior, this is a spectacular mismatch. If you want a cat that behaves like a small, spotted, opinionated flatmate, few breeds do it better.