The following are points you can use to help formulate your letters to the CFA Board of Directors. Please feel free to expand on these, and use them as best you can. You should also refer to Letter to Siamese Breeders for more ideas on how to format letters to the Board.
- CFA Siamese have remained unchanged for over a century. Siamese are one of CFA’s original breeds, accepted as a foundation breed in 1906.
- CFA Siamese are the fabric of the association, illustrating the highest of standards.
- CFA Siamese have been the largest contributors to other younger breeds.
- Pointed kittens in the litters of Orientals will cease if pointed cats were not used in their breeding programs.
- The Oriental breed can use its own pointed cats to maintain eye color, if they can’t maintain it any other way. They can also change their standard to allow other shades of eye color than green. They are purposing to change the entire purpose of their breed in adding a pointed division, so surely it makes more sense to simply allow different eye colors if the green eye can’t be maintained without using real Siamese.
- CFA Siamese without doubt the most recognized breed worldwide and contribute to CFA’s continuing success. As Siamese are eliminated worldwide with the exception of CFA, the demand for CFA Siamese to both enjoy for themselves and use as outcrosses for Oriental cats will increase. More and more the public is coming to recognize that Siamese are not pointed Orientals, and they are demanding purebred Siamese, with only Siamese in the pedigree. They don’t buy into the idea that you can have a real Siamese that has a different breed for one of its parents. It will only benefit CFA in the long run to have the only registry where the true Siamese cat can be found.
- A pointed Oriental group is a contradiction to the Oriental concept, which states in its standard that its “reason for being is its coat color: solid, shaded, smoke, parti-color, bi-color, or tabby patterned. Adding a pointed group to this breed changes the purpose, therefore it also changes all previous agreements made by the Board, including the perpetual outcross to Siamese.
- The Oriental would be subject to the same outcross rules as all other breeds if they create a pointed division. Oriental breeders must chose between a pointed class and continuing to outcross to the Siamese. By changing the purpose of the Oriental breed, they also eliminate the guarantee of using the outcross of the Siamese breed, which was given only when the Oriental was viewed as a cat created to look like Siamese in all but color.
- The color classes of shaded and smoke points create colors that can’t be identified as different from seal, blue, chocolate and lilac points except by physical means. The new standard proposed by the Oriental BC describes in the actual color description that the way to identify a seal smoke point is to separate the hair and view the undercoat. If you just look at smoke or shaded points, you can’t tell them from Siamese colors. Therefore they look like our cats, and cannot be allowed to be shown.
- The Oriental breed does not need to outcross to the Siamese. It has an ample gene pool to draw from, including all the “Siamese”/Oriental cats in other associations, including all of Europe, where the true Siamese has been eliminated through cross breeding and registering pointed Orientals as Siamese.
- If the Siamese breed is eliminated by being subsumed into the Oriental group of cats, there will be no place for the children breeds to go in the future when they need outcrosses. The Oriental is by no means a healthy breed, having many defects not seen in the Siamese breed, and if our breed is no longer available, they will not be able to replenish their own genetic pool in the future.
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