Urban myths about fearsome felines nothing more than just a trick of the tail

If you have been living in Asia for a while, you've probably noticed a number of cats with short cut-off tails or longer ones with a kink.

An urban myth is that cats are so beautiful Chinese parents don't want the animal's beauty to detract from that of their own children, so they cut off the tail to lessen a feline's attractiveness.

Another myth in Japan is that cats turn into monsters called bakeneko and one way to prevent this transformation is for people cut off the tail.

British television cat expert and chairman of the British Naturalist Association Roger Tabor debunks this theory, explaining Asia's kinky-tailed cats started from a genetic mutation.

'The population is so high of kinky-tailed cats, could you imagine how many demented people you would need to cut off all these tails?' he says.

Possibly the Manx cat, known for its naturally short tail, was crossed with another to produce a range of full-length tails with 22 vertebrae, shorter tails or no tails at all.

According to Tabor, domesticated cats most likely originated in Egypt or areas around the Middle East thousands of years ago.

'They were a special animal that was treated with great respect. And they were useful if you were exporting cargo because ships always had rats and mice, so cats would help to control the rodents,' he says.

'From the early days, when explorers and traders travelled from Egypt to India, cats were a part of that.'

Cats were first recorded in China around 400 AD, Tabor says. Then they disappeared from records until about 1,000 years ago, which coincided with the establishment of the ancient Silk Route.

Chinese traders loved cats since they reduced the mouse population that would eat silkworms.

The evolution of kinky-tailed cats came about through the spice route on ships, from the Middle East, through India, to Indonesia and Singapore, then on to China.

A few years ago, Tabor conducted a survey in Thailand that showed 60 per cent of the cat population were kinky-tailed. About 70 per cent in Singapore were kinky-tailed, while only 30 per cent of the population were found to be kinky-tailed in Hong Kong.

'In Asia, [kinky-tailed cats] probably arrived in Singapore first. And, if there had already been a lots of cats there, like in India, cats that arrived with a genetic abnormality would have made very little difference,' Tabor says.

'But if they were, say, the first cats to arrive, its kink would become a large part of the genetic base.'

The kinky-tailed population can also be explained from the founder effect, which happens when a population of reduced genetic variation is started by a few members to have a 'very powerful effect'.

It's these early cats that created the population and spread out across Asia. 'If you look at the percentage of kinky-tails and non-kinky-tails, it seems to start in Singapore,' Tabor says.

Another new breed of cat to come to Asia hundreds of years ago was the 'ginger' orange-coloured cat. 'The ginger gene came across the Silk Route and was brought to China as a gift,' Tabor explains.

Ginger cats originated in the Middle East and were introduced during the period of Kublai Khan, who ruled the Mongol empire from 1260 to 1294 during the Yuan dynasty, Tabor says.

Then, during the Ming dynasty, Chu Chan-chi (1399-1435), also known as Emperor Hsuan-tsung, was a gifted artist who painted cats. In one of his paintings, calico kittens are at play trying to catch a bird.

'These white cats with blobs of orange and black indicated that the ginger or orange gene had arrived,' Tabor explains.

One historical document that illustrated breeds was the Cat Book Poems written in Thailand's Ayudha, sometime between 1350 to 1767. The folded book is one of the earliest documents of cats, recording 17 types from that period.

'They were mainly black and white, but no ginger cats, which shows that up until that period, there was no record of ginger cats,' explains Tabor, who has written some 10 books on felines, including Cats - The Rise of the Cat.

The Siamese is another breed that has origins in Asia. Named after the country of Siam, or present day Thailand, the breed was traditionally the royal cat of Siam, according to Tabor. 'The Siamese cat has a coat with five colour points, areas that are darker on the tail, legs, paws, face and ears, while the body is paler. It's very unusual.'

These funny looking cats were first introduced to Britain from Thailand around the late 1880s, when the King of Siam gave them to the British Council in 1884, says the animal behavourist. 'When they arrived, they were wonderful, exotic and Oriental, a strange nightmarish animal,' he says. '[British people] were used to one-coloured cats. With this sort of marking, it was weird, but then people started breeding them.'