Norwegian Forest Cat
Freya, for whom the F in TGIF is named, is the Norse goddess of
beauty, love, fertility and, on the odd occasion, battle and death.
Not
to be confused with Frigg, the goddess of marriage, who prefers
gauche-white limousines,Freya often goes traveling in a chariot
hitched
to a team of cats -- when she isn't riding on a golden-bristled
boar. Cat lovers contend that Freya rolls out her cats and chariot in
the
service of love and fertility, reserving the pig for less savory
occupations. What's more, say Norwegian forest cat fanciers, the cats
providing the horsepower for Freya's runabout are the
mythological antecedents of the Norwegian forest cat.
Norwegian Woods
On the physical plane the Norwegian forest cat, Wegie for short,
is a naturally occurring breed whose domain comprises the farms and
woodland of central Norway, which territory lies roughly between
the 59th and 62nd degrees north latitude. That's only a snowball's
throw from the Arctic Circle, which begins at 66.5 degrees north
latitude. (The only one of the United States that lies above the 59th
parallel is Alaska.)
The rough winters of Norway nurtured the forest cat's vitality,
resourcefulness and sensible, semi-long, water-repellent coat. In
order to
master his trying domain the Wegie was also obliged to develop a
diehard, constitutional resilience to the harsh, wet climate that
rewards
the survivors of one winter by allowing them the opportunity to
survive another.
Some observers theorize that forest cats are the products of
fraternization between shorthaired cats brought to Norway from
England by
the Vikings 1,000 years ago and longhaired cats imported by the
Crusaders in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Others challenge the
notion that Crusaders returned from their missionary endeavors
with any cats. Still others assert that Norwegian Vikings, who
reigned
havoc on the coasts of Europe and beyond from the 8th to the 10th
centuries, kept forest cats as mousers and pets. Some of these cats
were introduced to the lands toured by the Vikings, thus helping
to an extent to restore the balance of trade with those lands. The
Vikings'
talent for disseminating cats is credited by some for the
presence of semiferal longhair cats in places such as Normandy and
the North
Atlantic coastal regions of the United States.
Hindsight being no less subject to flights of fancy than is
foresight, some people have constructed links between the Norwegian
forest cat
and the Norwegian lynx. "The most apparent of these," says one
lynxologist, are similarities in size, ruffs and ear tufts. "Moreover
they
both like water, and the stories of swimming forest cats who
catch their own fish in lakes and rivers are innumerable. The forest
cat
evidently utilizes the same methods as the Norwegian lynx when it
goes fishing."
Finally, some Wegie advocates put their own spin on the history
of feline domestication: "We do not know ... when it [the Wegie]
first
approached people and joined the ancient tribes in their
wanderings."
Whatever the forest cat's origin the earliest references to cats
that resemble today's Wegies are found in Norwegian folk tales that
were
gathered and recorded between 1837 and 1852. Another reference to
the forest cat occurs in Norwegian author Gabriel Scott's
Sølvfaks,
a popular children's book published in 1912. The central
character in Sølvfaks (silver fox) is a forest cat of the same
name.
Truls Rules
Truls NFC
prototype
For all but the last 20 years or so the forest cat has been a
prophet without pulpit -- or papers -- in Norway. The Wegie was left
to his
considerable devices outdoors while those two-legged Norwegians
who succumbed to the spell of the show ring sought the indoor
company of Persians, Siamese and other members of the pedigreed
fraternity. There had been a few desultory attempts to promote forest
cats -- a red-and-white Norwegian male was shown in Norway in
1930, and a forest-cat club was started in 1938 -- but World War II
plowed these tender shoots under and kept the breed from
blossoming for several decades.
To make a worsening situation worse yet, continued postwar
breeding between forest cats and shorthair hauskatts, the equivalent
of our
free-ranging domestic felines, almost stopped the Wegie's
progress cold. Short hair being dominant over long, breedings between
shorthair and longhair cats will produce only shorthair kittens,
unless the shorthair parent is carrying the recessive gene for long
hair.
Fortunately in the early 1970s Carl-Fredrik Nordane, then
president of the Norwegian Cat Association, began lobbying on the
Wegie's
behalf. He organized a meeting at which the initial forest cat
breeding program was designed, and he helped to charter the
Norskskogkattering, a forest-cat breed club that held its first
meeting in February 1975. Two and a half years later Nordane traveled
to
Paris to plead the Wegies' case before the general assembly of
the Fédération Internationale Féline (FIFe), a
cat registry that governs
shows and related matters in Europe and other parts of the world.
Norway's quarantine laws precluded bringing any Wegies in living
color to Paris, but on November 25, 1977, Nordane showed the FIFe
assembly slides of two forest cats with certifiably winning
names: Truls and Pippi Skogpus. Truls, a brown-tabby-and-white
male, has been called "a glorious specimen ... the first prototype of
the
Norwegian Forest Cat breed."
The FIFe board of directors must have agreed. They voted to admit
Wegies to the ranks of pedigreed cats eligible to compete for the
greater honor and glory of their owners at cat shows. When
Nordane returned in triumph to Oslo the following night, flags were
flying,
music was blaring and 40 cars' worth of Norwegian Cat Fancy
Council members were conducting a joyous, horn-honking line dance.
Every Figure Tells a Story
Two years to the month after its November 1977 anointment by
FIFe, the Norwegian forest cat arrived in the United States. Sixteen
months later (March 29, 1981) the first Norwegian litter born in
this country was delivered. By 1984 the forest cat was accepted for
championship competition by the first of several North American
cat-registering associations. Today it is eligible to compete in the
shows
of all cat registries here.
During the six years following the birth of the first Norwegian
forest cats in this country, 350 members of the breed were registered
with
various cat associations. That works out to fewer than 60 new
registrations per year. Such are the numbers of what the cat fancy
calls
minority breeds. There were, according to the Cat Fanciers'
Association (CFA), only seven breeds out of the 31 it recognized in
1987
that had fewer than 100 new registrations that year. Since then
the forest cat population has grown. In 1997, four years after CFA
had
recognized Wegies, it enrolled 508 new forest cats. This number,
which represented an increase of 9 percent over the preceding year,
came at a time when the registrations of many pedigreed breeds --
and of pedigreed cats as a tribe -- were declining significantly.
(The
Wegie stood 17th among the 36 breeds recognized by CFA last
year.)
The Bottom Lines
Since it was given the keys to the pedigree-cat club's lounge two
decades ago in Europe, the Skogkatt, as the Wegie is known in the
land of its birth, has traveled from footnote to spotlight.
Referred to as a "living national cultural monument" by many of its
fans -- and
declared "the hottest breed in America's cat fancy" by a Chicago
Tribune writer five years ago -- the Norwegian forest cat is a
tactile
pleasure as well as a visual and temperamental delight.
According to Norse folklore there was once a forest cat so heavy
that the fearsome Thor -- the mighty god of thunder, the Bad, Bad
Leroy
Brown of all the gods -- could not lift the prodigious feline.
Whether or not Thor could lift a Norwegian forest cat, it's safe to
say he
couldn't resist petting one.
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