TICA-registered British Shorthair & British Longhair cattery in Houston, Texas
Types & colors
Our signature
Both of our pink colors trace back to Polar Bear, the male whose line Canan built this part of the program around. Rare color is not luck. It is one cat, chosen deliberately, and then several generations of pairing decisions made to keep what he brought and improve everything around it.
The rarest thing we produce. A lilac base under golden shading gives a coat with no grey in it at all — warm, powdery and genuinely pink in daylight, deepening to a soft mauve in the shade. Lilac alone is uncommon in British Shorthairs; lilac carrying golden is rarer still, and the pairing that reliably produces it took years to assemble.
c = lilac · y = golden · 12 = shaded. “Pink” is the breeders' word for the rosy cast, not a registry code.
The blue-based version of the same effect: cool smoke tipping over a warm apricot undercoat, with the rosy cast coming through where the light hits. It reads softer and cooler than the lilac and is the color families most often choose when they've come looking for the pink and want a little more depth in the coat.
a = blue · y = golden · 12 = shaded. Same “pink” cast, over the blue base rather than lilac.
Pink and lilac litters are not on the ground continuously. If this is what you came for, the waitlist is the way to get one — these are almost always spoken for before they reach the available page.
The four types
One breed, four looks. Almost every buyer arrives with one of these already in their head and no word for it, which makes choosing a kitten harder than it needs to be. Here are the words.
Short ears, compact body, an innocent little face
The modern type reads petite and doll-like. The ears are shorter and set lower, the body is full and solidly built rather than long, and the expression is soft and innocent — wide eyes, nothing sharp anywhere in the face. It's the type people mean when they say a cat looks permanently surprised to see them.
Keeps a kitten's face into adulthood
A baby face British holds the innocence of a kitten's face after it has grown up. Round, open, uncomplicated — the proportions that make people reach for the word 'baby' before they've thought about it. It is the type that photographs best and the one most first-time buyers turn out to have been picturing.
Wide cheek pads, a bear's face, and a permanent smile
The bear face is the most striking of the four. The cheek pads are broad and full, which gives the head the round, heavy look of a small bear, and the line of the muzzle sets into what genuinely reads as a smile. Cheek pads like these are hard to breed for and slow to arrive, and they are the single feature buyers most often ask us for by description without knowing the name.
Bigger body, later bloomer — the cheeks arrive after a year
Classic British kittens look different from the other three early on: the face is more pointed and the body is noticeably larger. The thing to understand is that a classic kitten is not finished. The cheek pads open up with time, usually after the first birthday, and an adult classic is a big, broad, imposing cat. Judging one at twelve weeks tells you very little.
One honest caveat. These are working breeder terms, not registry classifications — TICA and WCF judge a single British Shorthair standard. They are how breeders and buyers actually talk to each other about what a cat looks like, and they are how our kittens are priced, so it is worth knowing them. Describe the cat you are picturing and Canan will tell you which type you have just described.
What sets the price
Prices are set per kitten, never per litter. Four things move the number, and none of them is how cute the photograph came out.
The single biggest factor. Traditional blues sit at the bottom of the range; golden shaded and chinchilla sit above them; the lilac and pink coats sit at the top, because there are very few of them anywhere.
The exact EMS code on the pedigree, not just the color you'd name by eye. A cat registered cy 12 is a different proposition from one registered ny 12, and the code is what tells a breeder — or a future buyer — precisely what they have.
Modern, baby face, bear face and classic are priced differently, and how well an individual kitten expresses its type matters as much as which type it is. Cheek pads on a bear face are the clearest example: either they're there or they aren't.
An experienced breeder takes the type, color and pedigree of both parents, adds what she has learned from every litter before this one, and pairs for a specific result. Some of it takes years to get right. The effort and the experience are in the price, and the rarest kittens cost the most because they are rare.
A breeding program is not a series of individual matings. Canan takes the type, color and pedigree of both parents, adds two decades of watching how her own lines throw, and pairs for a specific result she has in mind. Some of those results take several generations to arrive at, and some never do. That is what you are paying for in a rare kitten: not a coat color, but the years of decisions that produced it.
That is completely normal, and it is the conversation Canan most enjoys having. Describe the cat you have been imagining and she will tell you what it is called, what it costs, and whether one is coming.