Modern Siamese cats

Modern Siamese cats (which are also known as show-style, extreme wedge or wedgehead) are very beautiful; svelte, elegant and graceful.

However, there's a great deal of controversy about them, with some people referring to their look as 'alien', or 'unnatural'.

The modern or extreme wedge type of cat has a long, slim body, small head, triangular wedge shaped face, long straight nose, huge ears, and a long slim whip-like tail.

These are show cats. They're very eye-catching, but there's also an air of fragility about them.

So why do some people hate them?

How did the modern body type come about?

Think of it like this.

When drawing a cartoon, a cartoonist will emphasize those features in a human which stand out as more extreme than the average.

And likewise, cat breeders over the years have bred from cats that they felt possessed the features (body shape, length of legs and tails, size of ears and shape of face) thought to be the most ideal version that they could be of the breed.

These breeders aimed to breed the perfect Siamese cat, and so they emphasized the features that they felt would achieve this.

However, this type of breeding led, over generations, to those features becoming more and more extreme (longer and longer bodies, smaller and smaller heads, ever more triangular faces, larger and larger ears).

The resulting shape was very far removed from what Siamese cats originally looked like, and many people, used to the 'original' version, were very unhappy with this new look, which really took hold in the 1980s.

The modern show-style Siamese

photo: © Vicvx | Creative Commons

The modern body shape and health problems

To achieve this look a certain amount of in-breeding took place, and this led to this modern type of cat becoming prone to health problems that included kidney failure, cardiomyopathy and other heart problems.

Generally, this breed is very healthy and long-lived, but because of the problems described, some of the modern, extreme wedge Siamese may die early in life, not surviving past five or six.

(This is certainly not true of all cats of this type, but it has been known to happen.)

Because of this there's been a move by breeders to promote and return to the more moderate, Classic or old-fashioned body type of the cats that were popular in earlier times.

More about the different body types:

• The Applehead Siamese body type
• All About Traditional Siamese Cats
• The Old-Fashioned (Classic) Siamese body type

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