Cat breed · Kenya
The Sokoke (or Sokoke Forest Cat in long form, and formerly the African Shorthair) is a natural breed of domestic cat, developed and standardised, beginning in the late 1970s, from the feral khadzonzo landrace of eastern, coastal Kenya. The Sokoke is recognised by several major cat pedigree registry organisations as a standardised cat breed. It is named after the Arabuko Sokoke National Park, the environment from which the foundation stock was obtained, for breed development primarily in Kenya and Denmark. The cat is long-legged, with short, coarse hair, and typically a blotched tabby coat, though specific lineages have produced different appearances. Although once rumoured to be a domestic × wildcat hybrid, genetic study has not borne out this belief. Another idea, that the variety is unusually ancient, remains unproven either way. The native khadzonzo population is closely related to an island-dwelling group, the Lamu cat, further north.
Behaviour: Sokoke cats are very active and enjoy climbing. They tend to be vocal toward human keepers and other cats with whom they live. They bond deeply to each other, as well as their owners. This trait makes re-homing harder for them, with a longer adjustment period expected in adult cats and older, already-bonded kittens.
The Sokoke does best in a controlled environment, because of their limited resistance to common New World cat illnesses, often found in catteries and multi-cat homes. Like all of the short-haired Asian group of cats, they do not thrive in extreme cold temperatures for extended periods of time. However, contrary to previous reports, they can be acclimated to colder climates, and do not require special housing any more than similar short-haired, Asian-group cats.
Their expected lifespan is the same as any purebred domestic cat, with 15 years an average old age.
Description: The forest population tend to consistently "breed true" for ticked coats in brown tones with prominent mottling with large rosette spots, which may fuse. They share this general feature with many other forest-dwelling felids, a natural form of camouflage. Aside from specific patterns, the cats in this population do not seem to vary widely in appearance. The town-dwelling population (presumably through crossbreeding with non-native cats) come in a wider variety of colours and patterns, including white-spotted coats, and some that are mostly black. The urban variety are very similar to an island population a few hundred kilometres north, the subject of a book called The Cats of Lamu by Jack Couffer. All of these populations are characterised by narrow faces compared to other African domestic cats, as well as long ears, long legs, and a lean, not cobby, body.
Appearance: The bodies of the Sokokes are medium-sized overall, long and thin, with long legs. The back legs are longer than the front legs, similar to those of a wildcat. They also have a unique tip-toe gait, in part due to a straighter stifle as well as the longer back legs. Their eyes are usually amber to light-green, set in a comparatively small head, with long ears, reminiscent of various species of wild cat, though these are traits intentionally reinforced by artificial selection. The tail is tapered.
Coat: Sokokes typically have blotched (also known as classic; i.e., marbled large-spotted) tabby coats in shades of black to brown, broadly similar to those of the Bengal and Ocicat. The centres or "oysters" of the patterns are hollow-looking due to the agouti gene, which also produces a "cold-ticking" or "salt and pepper" look to the coat, overall. This combination has been called "African tabby" or "African pattern", which may extend all the way to the tip of the tail. It is distinct from previously known blotched tabby patterns found in other breeds in this respect, but otherwise genetically identical, with all the normal tabby features (in cat fancier and judging terms, the patterns share the same ""butterflies" "eyeliner", "bonnet strings", "necklaces" and other characteristic markings). A particular "wood-grain" look is highly prized in show cats.
Their coats are short, and coarse but lustrous, with little to no undercoat. Recessive colours and traits are rare. Noted so far (and not accepted for showing by most registries) are black (i.e. "seal") tabby (US: lynx) point (accepted for showing in GCCF), melanistic (black or near-black), and "blue" (i.e. grey) colours. Long-haired specimens are almost unknown. "Chaotic", "chained", and "clouded" marbling patterns have been seen with the advent of the "new line", as deviations away from the earlier established modified blotched tabby pattern, but clearly based on the genetics of the landrace forest specimens from the 1990s. Perhaps owing to the admixture of city specimens, the original Slater lineage also fairly often produces small-spotted instead of blotched cats, perhaps indicating earlier crossbreeding with non-native cats (the Egyptian Mau, for example, has such a pattern).
Original Khadzonzo Landrace: Coastal Kenya's distinctive, free-roaming, feral cats – known as khadzonzo or kadzonzo, and found from city streets to the Arabuko Sokoke National Park – were "discovered", in the Western cat fancy sense, by horse breeder and wildlife artist Jeni Slater in 1978 near the Kenyan Watamu coconut plantation, though of course the cats were known for much longer by native people. By that point, the rural population were thought to be nearly extinct due to human encroachment on the forest and its resources. Although there were ideas that it might be a new subspecies of wildcat, the tameness of the kittens Slater reared suggested that theoretical hybridisation with wildcats was unlikely, as did features like the long, tapered tail (not characteristic of any wild African species), a general form consistent with Asian domestic cat breeds (very unlike the cobby figure of wildcats), and the mottled, blotched coat pattern (a characteristic of urban cat populations). The feral khadzonzo were developed into a standardised breed, the Sokoke, which has a much more uniform appearance than the landrace cats.
History: The Sokoke is a "natural breed", i.e., one developed and standardised from the local, free-breeding landrace population, and thus distinct from it by virtue of careful selective breeding for specific, fixed traits believed to epitomise the distinctions evolved by natural selection in the original population. As British cat geneticist and pedigree judge Pat Turner wrote in 1993, in the early days of recognition of the breed's standardisation, the fixing of traits like large "wild-looking" spots that are distinct from other blotched breeds "can only be done by selective breeding".
The breeding programme was begun in 1978 by Jeni Slater, who originally named the breed the African Shorthair. She used cats found in and around Watamu, both raised from kittenhood and enticed from the adult feral population with food rewards.
