Singapore’s Native Cat Breed

Meet the Singapura:

CC-BY-SA-2.0; CC-BY-SA-2.5 squeezeweasel

Singapura is the original name of Singapore, and is also the name still used for Singapore in the Malay language.

But… did you know that there’s also a cat breed called the Singapura?  This cat breed was discovered here in Singapore in the 70s and originated from cross-breeding between community cats.  The cats were exported to the US were the breed was refined, with undesirable traits being bred out until we have the Singapura of today.

At the time, the Singapura became a popular icon for tourists and the Singapore Tourism and Promotion Board (now Singapore Tourism Board) decided to use the cat breed as an iconic Singapore mascot.  The name “kucinta” (kucing + cinta) was chosen for the cats after a naming competition and statues of these cats can be found along the Singapore River.

Singapore community cats, or strays, produced a recognized breed of cats that are valued the world over, sometimes pulling upwards of 600 GBP each.  When they became popular and could be monetized, they were recognized and made into a mascot to attract tourists.

So… why is it that these days community cats are rounded up by Town Councils and executed at the slightest provocation?

2 thoughts on “Singapore’s Native Cat Breed”

  1. yeah. they dont want the cats but when you want to bring the cats to another country, they want you to pay for that.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.