The standard asks for short and dense coat. “Dense and luxurious, close-lying, unusually soft and silky to the touch.” Judges often say they should be able a recognize a Bengal with their eyes closed, simply by touching it.
Many cats you can see in shows have now lost that quality. While looking for the wild look, certain catteries have reintroduced in their breeding programs cats with ticking and a lower quality of texture. This is nonsensical, when you consider the fact that breeders have tried during long years to eliminate ticking. Is this a step forwards or a step backward?
Where does ticking come from, and is it part of the wild heritage? There are indeed wild cats with ticking, like the European wild cat, for instance. But the felines, which live in tropical regions – the ocelot, the jaguar or the leopard – have no ticking. And one must keep in mind that the standard says that “Its basic appearance should resemble a small, forest dwelling wild cat”. One also wisely avoided to say that the breed should look like the Felis bengalensis, as this would not have made in any way the breeders’ task easier, nor stopped the controversies. There are indeed 10 different breeds of Felis bengalensis, with different looks. The cats living in Siberia are more grey, with a slightly longer hair, quite a lot of ticking and no rosette at all. While those living in Northern India have the most beautiful rosettes, a deep colour and no ticking. More down south, the species are less coloured and have less rosettes, but always relatively little ticking. So, which model? Besides, one must know that apart from one case, all the Felis bengalensis used to create the new lines of Bengals, were born in captivity. And the zoos or privates, who have bred those animals, have paid little attention to the peculiarities of the various species. This resulted of course in many crosses, and it is consequently almost impossible nowadays to determine the exact species we’re working with.
To come back to the first question, I would say it is pointless to pretend that ticking is part of the wild heritage. Or even that it adds anything to the wild look. Ticking may have been introduced in the breed by some Felis bengalensis, but the Abyssinians are more responsible for it, all the more so that in the very beginning of the breed, they helped us to create the deep colour we were looking for.
If you take the standard into account, I think that breeders should try and create a cat with no ticking, a beautiful deep background colour, which can vary from yellow to orange, but definitely not grey. And despite the fact that the standard no longer mentions of ticking as necessary or preferable. That’s why I think that reintroducing ticking in the breed was a step in the wrong direction, all the more so when you think that it usually takes four generations to go from a cat with ticking to a cat without. There was one reason to justify this step backwards: some cats with a lot of ticking had incredible heads. IW SGC Hunterdonhall Tarzan – picture above – is a good example of this: even if its hair texture is of a lesser quality, it surely has a lot of things to offer to the breed.
Many Bengals that we se in shows today have what we call the “golden glitter”: when you look at them in the light, they seem to be covered with gold dust at the tip of each hair. This is beautiful, spectacular, and this is a characteristic unique to this breed. The standard says that:“ coat may be glittered or not glittered, with neither type to be given preference”.
This indifference can be explained because the “golden glitter” is caused by a recessive gene, which was introduced in the breed by a domesticcat, Thori of Delhi. This was a male, which lived in the cage of Delhi zoo’s rhino, and which Jean Mil, the creator of the breed, had brought back to the USA to start the very first breeding program of Bengals. The “glitter” adds nothing to the wild look of a Bengal, even if it is always associated with a good quality of the hair texture.
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