The Rex cat is one of those rare developments that often result for some strange reason following a war or other period of massive change. On July 21, 1950, a curly coated, cream male kitten was born in a litter of five barn cats in Cornwall, England. The litter belonged to Nina Ennismore, who named the curly coated lad Kallibunker. Since whe had formerly bred Rex rabbits, Ennismore assumbed that Kallibunker’s coat was the work of a spontaneous mutation, one that had also occured in rats, mice, and horses. Encouraged by can fancier Brian Stirling-Webb and geneticist A.C. Jude, Ennismore bred Kallibunker to his mother - a tortie-and-white straighthaired cat named Serena - whom she also owned. This breeding produced two males and a female in August 1952. The female was normal coated, the males were both Rex. One of those died at seven months, the other, named Poldhu, was eventually used to propagate Ennismore’s new breed, called the Cornish Rex after its place of origin. Meanwhile, in East Germany in 1951, a wavy-haired, black female cat -which had been observed on the grounds and in the basement of the Hufeland Hospital for five years - had beed adopted by a cat lover named Dr. Rose Sheuer-Karpin. For the next seven years this German Rex, named Lammchen, produced numerous straighhaired kittens sired by local toms. When she was bred finally to one of her sons, two of their four kittens had wavy hair. This suggested that the gene behind the Geman Rex was recessive: i.e., the Rex coat pattern would be expressed only when a kitten inherited two copies of the gene for that trait, one from each parent.
CORNISH REX
