Hi there,

I loved looking at all of your pictures. Please help me itentify my two.

Lamoni is Maine Coon without papers, we think:


But Fifi is sort of a mystery:


Please help me figure out what she is. I was in a HyVee grocery store one day and spotted the store brand cat food in little cans. There was her picture on the label! I could tell that the picture had been altered because I have never seen any color like hte one on the can. It was though they had taken a black and white photo and colored the cat dirty yellow. I also have a 1999 calendar called "Cats & Kittens" where her twin is one of the cats of the month.

If you look at her fur closely (and the photo posted here is not good enough) you can see that she has thre kinds of hair in the coat. She has normal cat hair and then there are these long clear shafts of hair. In between those two kinds are the finest, softest, thinest hair that I have ever seen on any animal. This is most pronounced around the neck rough. It's like angel hair.

Someone told me that she is Persian but not the kind that we have today. The Persian with the pushed in nose, I'm told, is a fairly recent thing (circa 1940 by some accounts and 1920 by others). The original Persian had the kind of face that Fifi has. My old vet said that this was called "Doll Faced Persian" and that she is rare.

I can't find Fifi in any of the breed books atthe store the way that I did Lamoni (my Maine Coon breed book has a thirteen point checklist and Lamoni scores high on ten of the thirteen).

She has the strangest meow that gets lower when she wants something more. Almost a bass voice at times. I broke out laughing the first time that I saw her puzzled by something she encountered. Her tail formed the exact shape of a question mark.

I love my two cats more than I can stand at times. Both were cats that others had discarded, but they were never stray.

What IS Fifi?