Minskin

A hairless cat with short legs, bred using the Munchkin and the Sphynx.

Health and welfare of hairless cats

Cats have hair and fur for important reasons – it provides protection, warmth and helps with communication. The hairs also provide information about the cat’s environment, as they are very sensitive to touch. Because keeping its coat in perfect condition is very important, the cat has developed a barbed tongue for effective grooming and spends a large amount of time on this activity. Depriving a cat of its hair coat will have many detrimental consequences including exposing delicate skin to harmful ultraviolet light, and making skin injury much more likely. Because there is no hair on which to distribute the oil produced by the skin, the oil accumulates and can make it feel greasy, mark furniture or collect in the cat’s nail beds. Hairless cats have to be bathed on a regular basis. The skin may be prone to yeast infections and obviously the cats are susceptible to cold and to sunburn if they go outside.

Health and welfare of short-legged cats

Cats (Felis catus) are not a species with naturally short legs. Mutations that cause short legs may be detrimental in restricting aspects of the cat’s mobility and in some cases leg deformities may be painful and debilitating through the development of abnormal joints.

Our position on breeding cats is that first no harm should be done. There is not enough evidence to say that the short legs of the Munchkin come without problems; add to that the skin and lifestyle issues associated with the Sphynx – we do not feel that these cats should be bred.

Important

We have limited the information about inherited disorders to those conditions that are known and proven to exist within a breed. For many breeders and many conditions, insufficient information may be available at this time to know whether any particular breed is necessarily free of any particular condition.

In general, pedigree breeds use a much smaller gene pool for breeding than domestic cats and therefore have a higher risk of developing inherited disorders. In addition, a number of ‘newer’ pedigree breeds are derived from matings between one or more ‘older’ breeds, and in these situations perpetuation of inherited problems that were seen in older breeds is likely within the newer breeds.