Kingston cat event months in the making

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The sun was shining outside on a crisp, cold Saturday morning, but inside at Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, it was raining cats.

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No dogs, just cats, as the Canadian Cat Fanciers Club hosted its annual benefit cat show, which saw more than 125 cats, along with their owners and a massive throng of onlookers, celebrate all things feline.

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With more than 25 different breeds of cats participating, onlookers were treated to many different, ahem, CAT-egories of competition.

Vendors, organizers and cat enthusiasts jam-packed the room inside the facility, with smiling onlookers snapping photos, scratching a few chins and soaking in the competitive side of the event.

Ashley Reeson, one of the event’s organizers, spoke about the show being the, ahem, purr-fect event for cat lovers and owners.

“This is run by the Canadian Cat Fansters Club, a benefit club for the Canadian Cat Association,” she said, adding that shows are held all across the eastern part of Canada. “Our next show Is in Ancaster, then after that we go to Lindsay, then we move out to Dartmouth, N.S.”

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Reeson confirmed the Kingston event featured 126 cats total, with more than two dozen different breeds.

“You’ve got your usuals like your Persians, your Maine Coon, to the ones a little bit more obscure like your Singapuras, your Birmans, your Tonkinese. It’s kind of all over,” she said.

Reeson declared the event, which takes months to plan, a success just hours into its first of two days.

“The first thing is to find a venue that’s large enough, then it’s working on getting our judges, then advertising and kind of just building it up,” she said when asked how the event comes together. “Our entries close a week out from the show. The big thing is advertising it, getting our vendors, making it good for us as the exhibitors to show off our cats, and for our spectators to come in and to watch and to find things for their kitties.”

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The only thing more prominent than the meows that could be heard throughout the room were the smiles.

“This show, we actually have five different classes,” Reeson said. “You have your kitten class, which is for registered purebred cats, ages four months to eights; you have your championship class, which is ages eight months up that are your unneutered, unspayed cats, which typically are breeding; you have your premiership class, which is your spayed, neutered, purebred pedigree class; then we go into our household pet class, which is for anybody as long as they’re over four months, you can be four months to 25 years old. They can come in, show, they get judged on cleanliness, wanting to be here, just overall anything unique, like if they’ve got a neat colour, unique pattern, whereas the pedigree classes are judged based on their breed standard. And our fifth class is for the purebreds as well, it’s the veterans class, which is for all of our cats that are seven years and up. It gives them a whole other thing to honour your older cats, the health and everything on them.”

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Kim Monkhouse, one of the judges on Saturday, held up an adorable, fluffy and rather playful cat after finishing judging it.

“That was a Scottish fold shorthair,” Monkhouse said. “It was blue, gold and shaded, female, just over a year old.”

Just don’t ask her its name.

“I’m not allowed to know any names,” she said, a rule for judges.

Monkhouse explained the task judges are charged with for the event.

“We judge each category one at a time, so that we judge every cat in the show once,” she said. “And they’ll go into all four rings. Right now, I’m doing my shorthair champions, purebred cats that have not been spade or neutered and they’re adults over eight months of age.”

Judging at the prestigious event comes after many, many years of practice and study, she said.

“As a judge, we have to memorize all the cat standards,” Monkhouse said. “We have to know what, in every single breed, to specifically look for, and we first judge at the breed level, then at the end we’ll do a top 10, where we do our top 10. It takes many years. Many, many years of being a show organizer, working at shows, breeding cats and then years of learning those cat standards.”

janmurphy@postmedia.com

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