German Rex

by **Maria Fernanda Reynoso** 16th November 2017, 12:10

Is a breed recognise by the FIFE (Fédération Internationale Féline)

Origin: As the name mention,is a breed originated in Germany.

Description:

The German Rex is a medium-sized breed with slender legs of a medium length. The head is round with well-developed cheeks and large, open ears. The eyes are of medium size in colours related to the coat colour. The coat is silky and short with a tendency to curl. The whiskers also curl, though less strongly than in the Cornish Rex. They may be nearly straight. The accepted colors for the coat are all the shades of brown, blue, red, fawn, cinnamon, white, chocolate, black, and seal. They have an average weight of 8 lb (3.6 Kg). The body development is heavier than in the Cornish Rex - more like the European shorthair.

Temperament:

These cats have an overall pleasant personality. They love to be cuddled and pampered. Since they are very social and friendly,they do well with their family, strangers, and other pets.The German Rex cat is lively,playful,intelligent and energetic but he is also very patient. They display enormous loyalty and like to be with their owner at all times and quickly bonds with its owner.

History:

An early Rex-type cat from Germany was Kater Munk, a cat of the family of one Erna Schneider, that was born 1930 or 1931 in a village near then Königsberg,German Reich (today's Kaliningrad,Russia). Munk spread his genes plentifully among the village's cat population till his death in 1944 or 1945. The Schneiders valued the strong tom with a penchant for catching fish from the family's garden pond for himself, not for his curly coat; he was, it seems, referred to colloquially as a Preußig Rex ("Prussian Rex", in local dialect). German Rex researchers do not consider Kater Munk to be related to the German Rex breed and state that he was never bred.

In the summer of 1951, a doctor in Berlin-Buch,Rose Schauer-Karpin, noticed a black curly-coated cat in the Hufelandklinik hospital garden. The clinic's personnel told her that they had known the cat since 1947. The doctor named the cat Lämmchen (German for "little lamb"). Her supposition that she must be the result of a mutation, was shown to be correct. Thus Lämmchen was the first breeder-owned Rex-type cat and the maternal ancestor of all the current German Rex.

The first two German Rex deliberately bred were two Rex kittens from a 1957 litter of four, offspring of Lämmchen and the straight-coated son Fridolin she had with a stray black tom Blackie adopted by Scheuer-Karpin. Lämmchen died on December 19, 1964 or in 1967, indicating she had been very young when first sighted in 1947. She left a number of Rex and crossbred descendants - the last one of her offspring was born in 1962 - most of which were used to improve other breeds such as the Cornish Rex which was suffering from skin problems due to being descended from genetically impoverished thoroughbred stock. In 1968, the lineage hinged on the efforts of the GDR cattery vom Grund who acquired the last 3 Rex offspring of Lämmchen not sold abroad, and amplified the lineage with European Shorthair and mixed-breeds. A stock was established in the West through the efforts of the FRG von Zeitz cattery in 1973 which in the previous year had acquired their sample of the allele with the white female crossbred Silke vom Grund. After some years, the breed slowly became more plentiful.

Another Rex cat turned up in Berlin-Buch, apparently in the late 1950s. The tom named Schnurzel eventually contributed to German Rex breeding; it is not known how he related to Lämmchen but presumably he was a grandson of hers, as Scheuer-Karpin would let her cats roam free through the gardens and forests of Buch. Even in more recent times, the genetic legacy of Lämmchen if not Munk manifests itself on occasion in the Berlin area, such as Pumina, found as a stray linage of Preuss from Siegburg which turned up in 1979 in the Rhineland town of Siegburg does not appear to be related to be a German Rex proper; it is almost certainly not related to Lämmchen. Nonetheless, his descendants may have contributed to the German Rex lineage of today.

Genetics

Lämmchen (German Rex),mutation gene is recessive, meaning it will only show when both alleles are "Rex" In the following years, any curly-haired cats in the Königsberg area went unnoticed or at least were not bred on purpose; the allele nonetheless would have stood good chances to remain in the local cat population, as recessive alleles have a very low probability to disappear entirely.

Caring for a German Rex cat

Brush his hair once a week to remove dead hair and help distribute natural oils. Since their coat gets especially greasy, this cat will need more bathing time than other cats.Wrapping the cat in a towel immediately after bathing will make it easier to dry its hair.