I still can’t work out why Stoid is getting up folks from the UK in this thread. She made some comment which in an overall context made as much sense as her comments usually do.
Kambuckta tried to get things on line.
I have a cat with a “squished in” face. I guess it was bred as a show cat. It is a pet who doesn’t know it is butt ugly and the other cat laughs at it behind its back. They seem contented.
(FWIW I would never buy a pure bred animal that is maintaining inbred problems. I have never shown an animal- except my dark side at a Happy Hour. But, like the Giant Rat of Sumatra, the world is not yet ready for that).
Some kinds of animals enforce such a taboo simply in the social structure, as will elephants: once males start to reach sexual maturity, they are booted out, thereby ensuring there won’t be any hanky-panky among close relatives.
The same with gorillas and many other social species, boys gotta go before they start humping their sisters.
I think Malthus is talking about motives here. People think they are breeding hypoallergenic cats; while that is incorrect, the hypothetical idea of breeding a freaky-looking but less allergy-causing cat is less morally problematic than breading a freaky-looking cat for the sake of freakiness.
No, no, no. Why can’t you people ever get it straight? You shoot your grandfather.
From what I’ve been able to glean, somehow the people in the U.K. who track what traits are “desirable” in a breed are even worse that the comparable organizations in other countries. Or something.
Of course he’s talking about motives. And I’m saying, if your “motive” is based in a “fact” that would be revealed as false with even two seconds of research on fucking Wikipedia, it’s not a mitigating factor, anymore than the “fact” that Jews were responsible for the economic collapse of Germany was a valid reason for the Holocaust.
It isn’t obvious that the “fact” is wrong. While hair may not itself be the cause of allergens, the protiens which cause allergens are - allegedly by some - more widely distributed by the shedding of hairs and dander. Thus, a hairless cat means less protiens in the environment (or so the theory goes), and those with middling allergies would benefit from a hairless cat.
This can be discovered with the proverbial “two second research on fucking Wikipedia”.
“Similarly, cat breeds such as the LaPerm, Sphynx, Oriental Shorthair, Devon Rex, and Cornish Rex, which lack some of the normal layers of cat fur, are generally held by mild allergy sufferers to be significantly less likely than other breeds to provoke an allergic reaction.”
Emphasis added. (And to the rest of these.)
And let’s look at the very beginning of the article on cat allergies: “Cat allergy in humans is an allergic reaction to one or more of the five known allergens produced by cats. **The most common **of these are the glycoprotein Fel d 1, secreted by the cat’s **sebaceous glands **and Fel d 4, which is expressed in saliva.”
So, tell me again what hair has to do with sebum or spit? Oh, wait, not having hair actually makes the sebum problem worse…
And here’s a nice gem from the Sphynx article itself:
“Body oils, which would normally be absorbed by the hair, **tend to build up **on the skin. […] Those with cat allergies may react worse to direct contact with Sphynx cats than other breeds. However, conflicting reports of some people successfully tolerating Sphynx cats also exist. However, these positive reports may be cases of desensitizing, wherein the ‘hairless’ cat gave the owner optimism to try and own a cat, eventually leading to the positive situation of their own adaptation.”
*Anecdotes *say that some people don’t react that badly. *Science *says Sphynxes will cause *worse *reactions for the majority of people with cat allergies.
They are both speculative and/or anecodal. Neither is “science”, since neither is sourced, or indeed more inherently believable or likely than the other.
Here is the only souce sited by your "scientific’ article for the hypo-allergenicy of the Sphynx:
Why should we be valuing what this person “feels” and “has seen” over someone else?
Thus is revealed the problem with using Wikipedia as a source for making dogmatic and absolutist claims on a controversial issue. “The Science” indeed!
Are you fucking retarded? We **know **what causes cat allergies, and it isn’t their fucking hair. It’s most commonly caused by proteins in their sebum and saliva. What do hairless cats have as much of, if not more than, other cats? Oh, shit, that’s right: skin oils and spit. This isn’t opinion–this is fact.
(1) insisting that a freaking Wiki article is “scientific proof”, even after the cite has been shown to be quite literally based on someones’ rememberance of what once happened to a Main Coon cat breeder; and
(2) Mistaking what the argument is. The argument is that there is at least a reasonable basis for thinking that no-hair breeds are less allergenic. On review, the allegation as to why is that, because they lack hair, on which the protiens which cause the allergy stick, the person owning the cat is going to have a less allergy-laden environment and thus be less prone to allergic reactions. The presence of fur causes the cat to groom itself, spreading allergen-laden hair about.
The counter-argument is that this effect either doesn’t matter, or is counter-balanced by the direct exposure to the cat’s saliva.
Now, I’m not saying one is right or the other wrong - I dunno. Point is, quite obviously neither do you, since the only “cite” you have cited is freaking Wikipedia, which provides both theories, and the one you favour as “scientific” and thus obviously right - indeed, as obviously right as to draw a comparison with the Jews and Hitler - is based on a quote from some person whose sum total of scientific evidence is, and to quote:
Probably mostly because the documentary that caused her to post the thread in the first place is a BBC documentary about British dog showers and breeders.
Uh, no I’m not. You’re making up an argument and then assigning it to me. My point is that a quick Wiki search shows you the actual source of cat allergies, which isn’t hair. If you care to refute the scientific fucking fact that it’s proteins in sebum and saliva that are the most common triggers, though, be my fucking guest.
The *cat itself *still causes as much, or more, of an allergic reaction. The idea isn’t that the cat makes the environment less likely to trigger an attack, but that the cat itself is less likely to do so (which it fucking isn’t). Otherwise, you might as well argue that it’s equally valid to keep a cat locked in a 12" x 4" x 4" cage for its entire life, because that would make it “hypoallergenic” by preventing it from shedding anywhere in the house. You fucking idiot.
Your post really brings me back. When I was a veterinary student I was in the ICU when a peka-something went into cardiac arrest. With the first chest compression, its eyes just flew out of its skull and prolapsed. That’s a mental image I’ll never lose.
The only saving grace is that they’re about as easy to get back in as they are coming out.
