"Mae"

Brown Ticked Tabby
July 20, 2013

 

 

This delightful beauty makes me smile everyday.  A huge thanks to Bonnie for letting her come to be a "Moosecoon"!

She just tickles me, so so sweet, affectionate, silly and sometimes, yes, a bit of a mischief maker - but then that's part of the kitten handbook, after all.  Endlessly curious, she's the first to stick her nose into anything new.  She loves everyone she meets and takes new things in stride, except maybe bathing - she's not really happy about bath time!  But, she is a cat after all...

In the photos above you can see she enjoyed her first night in a hotel room when we traveled down to Roanoke for a weekend show.  To the right she's sitting on the back of the sofa as someone is sticking a paw through the staircase rungs to swat at the toy Mae finds so riveting...

Several years ago I started researching the genetics of the Ticked Tabby gene in the Maine Coon breed, a pattern which has become more popular recently in Europe and in other associations in the US. For some reason CFA is still reluctant to accept this natural pattern, but there is a group of fanciers still working on that!  Anyway, during my research I just plain fell in love with this pattern and the "wild" look it gives our beautiful Maine Coons.

 What I love most about the tabby pattern is the facial markings, and the Ticked Tabby pattern keeps those along with the bracelets on the legs and some necklacing - the gene basically eliminates the body striping, and the coat looks more like that of a cougar or a rabbit, with light "ticking" all over.  It is also known as "unpatterned agouti", which is really a more accurate descriptive term. Agouti means tabby, and this version of the tabby gene exhibits a lack of pattern on the body.

So about a year ago my quest began for a brown ticked female, and then Bonnie Pearson notified me that she had this lovely litter - I met her at a show in Roanoke and brought home my darling Mae :-)

Ms. Mae walked into the house and made herself completely at home, getting along immediately with all the cats, and even my annoying little dog didn't give her much pause. I've taken her to shows with me just to hang out and she's just always HAPPY.  I love her outgoing personality as well as her beauty.

"Mae Govannen" is from the Elvish language and means "well met".  Okay, Elvish is not a real language in terms of the real world in which we live - it is from Middle Earth and the world created by Tolkien :-)  Bonnie's cats are all named from that world and I wanted to honor her cattery with an appropriate name, and as she meets everyone with a kitty version of a smile, the name is quite fitting.

She is registered in TICA, and I do hope one day to register her in CFA along with her offspring who (again hopefully) will one day be competing in Championship alongside all the other Maine Coons!  Her type and personality and diverse pedigree are all great assets to my breeding program, and I love the look of this pattern.  I'm eager to see how her kittens turn out.

 

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