Cambodge & Culture: The history of cats in the Kingdom

On a sunny afternoon, a tourist queuing for tickets to the Palais Royal is fascinated by the skinny cats playing at his feet. Some of them have short, twisted tails, others have none at all.

A cat-shaped ceramic from Angkor, probably from the 12th or 13th century. Photo Louise Cort

This visitor had already seen tailless animals and knew only one explanation: as a child, he had heard that the owners cut off the tails of guard animals to make them more aggressive. When he went to Phnom Penh, he wondered if the Cambodians didn't cut them off too.

It was not the first time that the tour guide of the Royal Palace, Teoun Lyneath, had heard this question. Although the domestic cat is one of the most widespread animals in the world, experts are divided on the breed of the Cambodian short-tailed cat and its origin.

The history of cats in Cambodia is said to go back several centuries. Some historians claim that cats lived in the kingdom of Angkor, which ruled over present-day Cambodia and parts of Thailand and Laos from the 9th to the 15th century.

Angkorian temples and sculptures depict many animals - elephants, crocodiles, lions, fish, horses, monkeys, turtles, cows and even dogs - but no domestic cats.

According to Im Sokrithy, a Cambodian archaeologist, the word ‘cat’ is mentioned several times in inscriptions on the stone doors of temples dating from 611 AD. These inscriptions refer to servants who worked in the temples, nicknamed ‘cat’, he says.

‘The common people at that time were named after animals, trees, mountains or many things related to nature,’ he adds.

According to Louise Cort, curator of ceramics at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C., another clue is an Angkorian ceramic in the shape of a cat, probably dating from the 12th or 13th century. The brown-glazed container depicts a large cat with a collar, a bell and a long tail.

‘One publication describes similar vessels as depictions of dogs, but the tail seems to me to resemble a cat,’ explains Ms Cort.

Later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, cats began to appear in Cambodian literature, particularly in poems, where they were associated with femininity, explains Sokrithy. It is also during this period that descriptions of rituals involving cats can be found.

The Royal Palace tourist guide, Teoun Lyneath, with a tailless cat. Photo Julie Masis

For example, at the end of the dry season, it was customary to organise a procession through the whole village with a cat, to ask for rain. The person carrying the animal would stop in front of each house, and the owner would sprinkle water on the cat, says Sokrithy.

‘Nowadays, this custom is still practised throughout the Angkor region,’ he says, referring to the villages near the Angkor archaeological park in Siem Reap province.

Cats also play a role in Cambodian housewarming traditions. To bring good luck to the inhabitants of a new house, the lady of the house must walk around the house three times with a cat in her arms, says Sokrithy.

Finally, cats - especially females with tricolour fur - have a special significance for the royal palace. These cats are used during the coronation ceremonies of kings and are supposed to bring prosperity to the entire Cambodian nation. During the coronation of King Norodom Sihamoni in 2004, a cat was carried by the king's entourage, who had also brought statues, scrolls and animal horns, to climb the steps of the Royal Palace.

Unfortunately, there is no mention - neither in the inscriptions on stone, nor in Cambodian literature and traditions - of tailless cats. These cats are common in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. Theories about their origins vary from the strange - such as boys tying cats' tails with elastic bands - to the plausible.

But Arnaud Demarti, the French vet who runs Agrovet, one of the largest veterinary clinics in Phnom Penh, believes that the short or twisted tails of Cambodian domestic felines can be attributed to a recessive gene.

‘Two cats with broken tails can only have a kitten with a broken tail. But a male cat with a normal tail can still have kittens with deformed tails,’ he explains

He estimates that 80% of cats born in the city have a tail problem and that it is rare to find a cat with a normal tail. Mr Demarti believes that Cambodian cats are a breed of their own that has not yet been named. He suggests that the short-tailed cats of Thailand most likely carry the same gene as the cats of Cambodia.

But Marianne Clark, secretary of the Japanese Bobtail Breeders Society in the United States, thinks that Southeast Asian shorthair cats are most likely Japanese bobtails.

These cats are thought to have been brought from China by Buddhist monks around 1,300 years ago. The monks kept these cats to protect their scrolls, which were written on rice paper, a godsend for rats.

‘This may explain why there are bobtails all over Asia. The monks brought these animals with them,’ Clark writes.

There is no doubt that Chinese travellers visited Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, as far back as the time of Angkor. But Leslie Lyons, a geneticist at the University of Missouri in the United States and a feline specialist, believes that there is no certainty about Cambodian cats.

‘We have no way of knowing, unless someone gets hold of some DNA and tests it,’ she says.

‘They could be Manx short-tailed cats from the Isle of Man, or Japanese bobtails, a new variant of either gene, or a completely new gene.’

Lyons believes that a simple DNA test could identify whether a cat is a Manx, while Bobtails could be identified by counting their vertebrae on an X-ray. However, it seems that no one has yet taken this step.

Despite the lack of research on the gene that affects their tails, life seems to be improving for Cambodian felines.

According to the vet Demarti, more and more Cambodians are keeping cats as pets and taking them to the vet for check-ups.

‘When I arrived in Cambodia, Cambodians didn't keep cats at all. There were lots of them in the streets and in the pagodas,’ he says.

‘In the past, 95% of the consultations in my clinic were for dogs. Today, 30% of the consultations are for cats. There are now more Cambodians who look after them as if they were members of their own family.’

And so they thrive at the Royal Palace. Far from having their tails docked, they are looked after by the staff and fed leftover rice and fish heads.

There is even a royal line, in a way, explains tour guide Lyneath.

About 15 years ago, she says, someone abandoned two tailless cats: a male and a female. The palace staff started feeding them, and they stayed around, giving birth to a litter of kittens that were also tailless. There are now so many tailless felines living in the gardens that Lyneath has lost count.

‘It doesn't matter, cats can bring you luck,’ she concludes.

Julie Masis with our partner The Phnom Penh Post