Breed Profiles

A woman at the shelter handed me a cat with a stub of a tail and said, matter of factly, that he was probably an American Bobtail and that he would follow me around like a dog. I assumed she was doing sales. She was not.

Dexter followed me for eleven years.

The breed came out of a chance find in the nineteen-sixties, a short-tailed tabby kitten picked up in Arizona by a holidaying couple, bred on from there. Unlike the Manx, whose taillessness comes with real spinal risks, the Bobtail's short tail comes from a different mutation that has not carried the same problems. The tail is meant to be a flexible stub, roughly a third of normal length, and no two are quite alike. Dexter's ended in a slight kink and he waved it about with the enthusiasm of a cat who had no idea anything was missing.

They look wild and are not. Broad chest, long back legs, a slightly hunched, prowling walk, tufted ears, and a face with a heavy brow that makes them look permanently mid-thought. People assumed he had bobcat in him. There is no bobcat in the breed, that is folklore, but the resemblance is close enough that I stopped correcting anyone after the first hundred times.

The dog thing is real

He came when called. Not always, he was a cat, but reliably enough that I could get him in from the garden with a word. He carried things, small soft toys mostly, from one room to another and deposited them in whichever place I happened to be sitting. He rode in the car without protest. He learned to sit for a bit of chicken and once, on a good day, to give a paw, and then he decided the paw thing was beneath him and never did it again.

Bobtails are described in every breed write-up as intelligent and adaptable and both of those turned out to be true in ways that were sometimes inconvenient. He worked out door handles. He learned that the bathroom tap dripped if you sat under it and stared, because I had once turned it on for him. He opened the airing cupboard and slept on the towels for an entire winter until I put a hook on the door.

The coat is a shaggy double coat in the semi-longhair version, or a short dense one, and both shed more than you would expect. I combed him twice a week and still found tabby fur woven into every jumper I owned. There was a spring moult that produced enough loose fur to stuff a cushion. Nothing matted badly, though, and he never needed clipping, which is more than my friends with Persians can say.

He was slow to mature. Bobtails take two to three years to reach full size, and he kept filling out well past the point I thought he had finished, ending up around six kilos of solid, muscular cat. That slow growth is normal for the breed and it means a lanky, gangly adolescence that looks awkward and then resolves.

Health was straightforward. Because the short tail comes from a dominant gene without the neurological baggage of the Manx mutation, spinal defects are not the concern they are in that breed, though a responsible breeder still checks. Hip dysplasia shows up occasionally, and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is worth asking about in any pedigree cat, since it is the most common feline heart disease and screening the parents is the only useful protection. Dexter was a shelter cat with no paperwork, so I found out the hard way that he had a mild heart murmur at nine, managed with medication, and he did fine.

What I would tell anyone considering one is that these are sociable cats and they suffer alone. He was miserable during a stretch when I worked long days, and he told me about it by yowling at the door and pulling the post through the letterbox and shredding it. I adopted a second cat, a scruffy tortie with no breeding whatsoever, and the pair of them slept in a heap from the second week. A Bobtail in an empty flat all day is a Bobtail who will find a project you do not want.

They are also chatty rather than loud, a range of chirps and trills instead of the flat meow, and he had a specific noise for the fridge and a different one for the front door. That is one of those things you only notice years in, and then you cannot unhear it.

Finding one intentionally is harder than you would think, because they are not a common breed outside North America and the waiting lists are real. But the shelters have plenty of naturally short-tailed cats with no pedigree at all, some of them mixes and some of them just cats whose tails happen to be short, and the temperament I loved in him was probably as much luck as breeding. If you want the look and the dog-like company and you do not care about paperwork, start by asking a rescue whether anything short-tailed has come in.

Dexter died in the spring, on his towels, in the airing cupboard I had eventually given up defending. The hook is still on the door.