Oriental Shorthair

The Oriental Shorthair is the same cat as the Siamese with the colour restriction removed. That is not a marketing line but a genetic fact: the two share ancestry and, in several registries, breeding programmes, and a litter can contain both. What separates them is the pointed pattern. Remove it and you can have this body in solid ebony, blue, lilac, cinnamon, fawn, red, cream, tortoiseshell, smoke, shaded, and every tabby pattern, in something over three hundred recognised combinations. Everything else, the wedge head, the improbable ears, the long-legged, whip-tailed build, the temperament, the voice, comes with it.

The silhouette is genuinely striking and is why most people arrive here. In the flesh the cat is lighter than it looks. There is very little coat, no undercoat to speak of, and almost no fat, so an Oriental in good condition feels like a warm bundle of muscle and bone. It is also considerably more athletic than a decorative cat has any right to be. Ours would go from floor to the top of a door frame in two moves. Give this cat legitimate height, a full-height tree, shelves, a run along the tops of cupboards, and it will use them; withhold it and the bookcase becomes the route, with everything on the shelves as collateral.

Then there is the voice, and it deserves the space it gets here because it is what makes or breaks the match. An Oriental talks. Not the occasional chirp of a domestic shorthair but a loud, flat, insistent call, used deliberately, aimed at a specific person, and repeated with increasing conviction until it gets a response. It comments on the day, on the arrival of anyone at the door, on the state of the food bowl and on your having sat down without it. There is nothing wrong with the cat. This is a breed selected for a hundred years to engage with people, and the noise is engagement. If you work from home on calls, or share thin walls with neighbours, take it seriously before you fall for the ears.

Company is the other non-negotiable. The Oriental attaches hard, usually to one person, and follows that person from room to room, into the bathroom, onto the desk, under the duvet. Left alone in an empty flat for a full working day, this is not a cat that sleeps through it; it becomes bored, destructive and louder. Our standing advice for this breed is to take two, ideally littermates. It costs marginally more, halves the neediness, and gives the cat something to do that is not opening your kitchen cupboards. If it must be a single cat, the home should rarely be empty.

Care is otherwise as easy as it gets. The coat needs a weekly rub-over with a rubber mitt or a soft brush, which removes the little that sheds and mostly serves as a bonding routine. Nails every two to three weeks. Teeth several times a week, because dental disease is common across the Siamese-derived breeds and a slim cat with a narrow jaw does not hide it well. Watch weight in the other direction from most breeds: an Oriental should be lean, and a rounded one is carrying more than its frame is built for.

Warmth is the quiet practical point people miss. With a whisper of a coat and no reserve, this cat seeks heat constantly, under blankets, on laptops, against people, in patches of sun. Provide covered beds, leave a blanket on the sofa and keep at least one room comfortably warm in winter. A cold Oriental is a miserable one, and it will tell you at length.

Health follows the Siamese lines it comes from. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy appears across many pedigree breeds and should be screened by echocardiogram in breeding cats. Progressive retinal atrophy has a DNA test, and a good breeder will show the certificate rather than describe it. Amyloidosis, chiefly affecting the liver, is documented in Siamese-related lines and is the one to raise directly, since there is no simple test, what you want is a breeder who knows the older cats in their line and will talk honestly about them. Dental disease and, in some cats, food sensitivities round out the list.

The verdict is unusually clear-cut for this index. The Oriental Shorthair is one of the most rewarding cats to live with if you actively want a companion animal in the fullest sense, one that participates, learns, fetches, greets and argues. It is one of the worst possible choices if what you wanted was an elegant ornament with a low maintenance requirement. The ears do not tell you which of those you are getting. The volume does.