|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 8 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 Manx Cats: Everything About Purchase, Care, Nutrition, Groom Feb 20, 2004
This book gave good general info on cats, but not much, in particular, for Manx's. I was looking for details on their elimination problems due to lack of tail, and how to deal with it as far as special diets, etc. But, the possibility of elimination problems weren't even addressed in this book.
10 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Wonderful, accurate (for a change) writing. Sep 26, 1999
By Gale Thomas-goodman
"Manx cats"
I have bred and shown Manx cats for the past 11 years and this is the only book that I know of that is completely factual about the breed. There is a lot of printed matter on the breed which is either misleading or downright wrong. This book gives a new owner or prospective owner a good idea of what to expect from a Manx cat. The pictures are not up to the standard of the writing (one picture is of a Japenese Bobtail), but that certainly doesn't ruin the book. It is not so expensive that it is prohibitive as a research source while being attractive enough to add to your library of cat books. I think it is a book that all Manx owners could benefit from owning and I recommend it to anyone who adopts one of my kittens/cats.
10 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 Manx Cats Review Dec 15, 1999
By Jean Brown
Karen Commings has thoroughly researched and compiled an excellent "owner's manual" for the first-time Manx owner. Through contacting breeders and asking health, behaviour, and care questions, she has prepared a book which any Manx breeder (of which I am one) is confident to give to a new kitten purchaser and feel good about it. Despite an unfortunate photo mixup with one picture, Karen's book contains accurate and dependable information about the breed. Anyone considering buying a Manx or who has already purchased one will find the book informative and fun (did I mention, it's also a good read!).
5 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Most accurate book about Manx cats, yet May 26, 1999
This is one of the most factual books about Manx I've found. Very accurate and helpful. Great book and a great value.
 Serious errors; Manx-specific info available from CFA; general cat info surpassed by other works Dec 07, 2011
By S. McCandlish
"Webmaster, pool instructor, anthropologist by training, activist, tech & PR consultant"
The short version: While the author is well-known in cat publishing, the book repeats some very tired misinformation, offers outlandish and dangerous breeding advice with zero sources backing her up, is contradicted by some of her own sources, and uses biased breeders as other sources, when her sources can be determined at all. Where she is spot-on accurate about the breed, the information is available for free online from breed registries and veterinary info sites. Meanwhile, less than 1/10 of the book is actually about Manx cats in particular, so most of the book is a very short and overpriced basic "cats in general" book, far surpassed by more important volumes on that broader subject.
Detailed review:
Barron's is generally a reputable publisher for basic pet stuff (especially on reptiles), though less so than T.F.H., and this book is neither hogwash, despite some serious errors I detail below, nor children's fare. Sadly, it's not particularly useful either, especially given the very poor price-to-information ratio. The vast majority of Manx cat books (including those by Kallen, Landau, Britton, and Quasha) are ridiculously over-priced, tiny books written exclusively for the elementary/primary school library market. While this book is also aimed at and inflatedly priced for library collections, like the similarly titled books by Radford and Swantek, it is written in adult prose and is not a trivial entertainment book.
Commings is ostensibly a trustworthy writer on cats in general, having been a "Cat Fancy" magazine editor for many years, though nothing in her bio suggests she is a Manx breeder or otherwise a Manx breed expert. Most of the prose is written like it is intended to be copy-pasted boilerplate for all the "[X] Cats" books in the Barron's series, though I haven't bought any of the other ones to compare, and she's not listed as the author of any of them. Non-authoritativeness isn't really the issue here, as it certainly can be with pet books - the alleged qualifications of most authors in the field are murky at best, when identifiable at all. The real problems are that very little of this very little book has anything to do with Manx cats in particular, not all of that is entirely accurate, some of its breeding advice is downright awful (according to most Manx cat scholars, not me personally), and the bulk of the content - general house cat cat advice - is far outclassed by better-researched and more complete works.
The book specifically focuses on the Manx itself for less than 12 (yes, TWELVE) pages of total text, throughout all sections of the book, not counting space taken up by pictures. A lot of the information provided there is clearly better than that found in most (i.e. children's) books on the breed, which often very poorly summarize material from earlier works and inject a lot of assumption and misinterpretation, as if the authors had severe problems understanding and properly synthesizing their source material. Commings is smarter, better educated and a more skilled writer than that. But, what is breed-accurate in this book isn't anything you can't find online at the major, better-edited fancier association and veterinary websites these days.
And it's not all breed-accurate. In one glaring case, it's outright nonsense, repeating the urban myth that Manx cats with partial tails tend to develop medical problems and usually have their tails docked. Firstly, no reputable breeders anywhere do this. It was a common practice around a century ago, as reported by period writers like Charles Henry Lane ("Rabbits, Cats and Cavies", 1903, free on Google Books) and Frank Townend Barton ("The Cat: Its Points and Management", 1908, free on Google Books), as a form of fraud, passing off surgically altered, non-show-quality, or even non-Manx, kittens as potential Manx show cats, as well as fodder for the tourist market; this lasted up until the middle of the 20th century by which point Isle of Man tourism greatly declined, the breed was already spreading around the world and was no longer such a local curiosity, and international trafficking in live animals became more controlled. But docking hasn't been common practice in generations, is illegal in many places including almost all of Europe, won't be performed for non-medical reasons by ethical veterinarians even where still legal, and wouldn't fool anyone experienced with the breed, anyway (even Lane said this at the turn of the previous century). Secondly, it is "rumpy", completely tailless Manx cats that most often develop spinal, urinary and other medical problems. Those with partial to full tails - specimens that are used extensively in breeding programs even though they are not show cats - are the LEAST likely individuals of the breed to have breed-predisposed medical problems relating to the spinal alterations that results in tail shortening or absence. Obviously. While cases of fused, problematic tail vertebrae have been known to happen in partially tailed Manx (as in other breeds!), this is rare, and no controlled study of the breed has surfaced, as far as I can determine after over a year of looking for one, that demonstrates otherwise. In her defense, Commings is hardly the only author to repeat these particular bits of misinformation, but should probably have known better, and done better research on this one, instead of cannibalizing from other pet guide books. I'm surprised, actually, since she did some real fact-sleuthing on other information about the breed.
Much more seriously, a clearly and highly controversial claim by Commings (p. 96) is that it is categorically safe to breed a rumpy Manx to another rumpy as long as they are not from closely related ancestral lines. This is counter to the view of essentially every other author on the topic for over a century. It's actually very risky to do this, according reputable authors on the topic (see, for example, Swantek, et al., "The Manx Cat", T.F.H. Pubs., 1987). The Manx taillessness gene doesn't somehow "know" that the cats are related, it simply expresses the traits it is DNA-programmed to express. Inbreeding certainly does increase the risk of negative traits, especially recessive ones, being compounded, but the Manx taillessness gene isn't a recessive, but a dominant. Commings's genetic conclusion thus have a faulty basis, as well as no evident source other than her own ideas and, as we shall see, persuasion by a breeder pushing a promotional agenda. Sensible breeders know that because the statistically most likely specimens to exhibit problems are the completely tailless ones, the safest breeding course is to breed a "Mm" specimen (tailless or partially tailed Manx, with one copy of the Manx taillessness gene) to a "mm" (fully tailed Manx-bred cat without that gene but all other traits of the breed), and to definitely do this from time to time throughout a long-term breeding program, to keep the gene pool producing tailless cats and non-tailless kittens with a healthy genetic variety. (If you're wondering, there are no "MM" cats, with two copies of the Manx tailessness gene; they do not fully develop in the womb, as the gene is lethal when inherited from both parents.) A proposition as potentially disastrous as the one Commings advances requires citation to genetic studies in refereed science journals to be credible, but Commings doesn't actually provide any source for anything at all. A bibliography is included, but it's more of a short recommending reading list; there are no footnotes anywhere, and some of the works are simply other mainstream cat books, including Swantek's, which contradicts her in several places. Unclear sourcing is not a special fault of this book; most pet breed books are questionably reliable for the same reason, but most of them also do not make outlandish, and apparently dangerous claims like this one. It's outright reckless to recommend a breeding practice that everyone else publishing on the breed essentially says is very likely to result in a rising percentage of Manx kittens being deformed, miserable candidates for euthanizing.
A hilarious example of cognitive dissonance in the book (pp. 16-17) leads into a passage about Manx genetics and disease predisposition with "it is not uncommon to hear...'Manx syndrome' or 'lethal gene' with little or no understanding about what the words mean", and later says (of a peer-reviewed researcher whose work Commings criticizes, without a clear basis for doing so) "Robinson [is] thus perpetuating the negative stereotyping of Manx cats as mutants", which demonstrates little or no understanding of the meaning of the word "mutant". Of course Manx cats are mutants; all cat breeds (and dog breeds, etc.) are mutants. "Mutation" simply means "a genetic change". It doesn't imply "freaky weirdness" or "deformity", no matter how often bad science fiction abuses the word that way.
As other reviewers have noted, one of the pictures is startlingly wrong, showing what is really obviously a Japanese Bobtail (or possibly a Kuril Islands Bobtail - both breeds demonstrate the highly distinctive, bulbous tail kink in the photo, and it does not occur in Manx cats). This could have been forgivable, except that it's far worse that other commentators have suggested. The caption baldfacedly claims "A Stumpie [sic] Manx cat on the Isle of Man." This outright falsification of not only the identity of the breed but even the location of the photography means that NO caption in the book is trustworthy. Maybe not Commings fault, since layout and illustration of books like this is most often performed by someone at the publisher, not by the author, but this isn't a review of the author.
The other overall fault of the book is that, as noted, it is mostly a very general "how-to" book about domestic cats, regardless of breed, but not a great one, even if well organized. In most of the book, you can substitute "Himalayan", "Sphinx" or any other breed name for "Manx" and still have accurate text. At only 128 pages (less than 100 pages of usable "general cat" content when you subtract photos, bibliography, fancier association info, and the aforementioned dozen or so pages about Manx cats in particular), it's kind of pointless. There are far more detailed, more reliable and more useful books on cat adoption, behavior, nutrition, medicine, breeding and showing. A similar complaint can be made about Radford's "Manx Cat" (Animalia/Interpret, 2001) and Swantek's book, of course, because there really isn't a way to write an entire book about a single cat breed without it basically being a general cat book with a handful of breed-specific tidbits; cat breeds simply are not different enough from one another, no matter how "mutant" they are.
This book tries hard to convince everyone that the Manx has NO predispositions to medical conditions and that "Manx syndrome" is entirely a myth. In this it joins (and actually stems from) websites pushing a similar agenda, run by breeders who have an obvious profit motive in promoting the breed as completely unproblematic, and a less selfish but no less vested interest in countering, by any means necessary, the arguably extremist attacks by those who would like to see all the fancier organizations ban the breed. Most evidence and sources have strongly contradicted this "no such thing as Manx syndrome" position, since the breed was first written about up to current publications, both veterinary and general-audience. ManxCats.com, the most prominent site advancing this position, was a source that Commings and at least one other author of these short little Manx cat books have relied on heavily, according to the site itself, and it is clearly the origin of the bashing that the researcher Robinson receives in the book, among other almost ranting positions advanced (parroted, really) by Commings, like the idea that "Manx syndrome" is basically some kind of conspiracy made up by Manx cat haters. "Manx syndrome" is a blanket, vernacular term covering multiple medical issues that may or may not be related to the Manx taillessness gene, and it is not a precise medical term with a clear definition. It's comparable to "colic", "wasting disease", and other pseudo-medical terminology like this, nevertheless reporting on observable phenomena even if so vague it makes doctors roll their eyes. It is clear from the majority of sources that the Manx is one of the breeds more prone to somewhat breed-predictable medical problems. See, e.g., "Breed Predispositions to Disease in Dogs and Cats", 2nd ed., 2011, by DVMs Gough & Thomas, which is often available via inter-library loan in the earlier edition from a few years ago - I can't recommend buying it unless you are a veterinarian; it is a veterinary reference, not a general-audience work. See also the much earlier monograph "The Manx Cat" by Isle of Man veterinarian and Manx cat breeder D. W. Kerruish, 1965, sometimes also available for loan and occasionally found affordably on eBay. They and others make it clear that these problems strike the completely tailless specimens more frequently (even Commings concedes this, on p. 17). I think it's much more plausible that they're simply right, about most or all of this, than that Commings and ManxCats.com are correct that it's all just anti-Manx prejudice and hysteria. Please.
For all these reasons, I cannot recommend this book except as an adjunct work for someone who wants to read pretty much every source of information about the breed. (That's why I got it, and even the children's books on the topic; I'm a completist.) As long as you are aware of the misinformation problems I've flagged (and maybe there are others; I only identified and reported on a few, and others will have to review the nutritional and other general info in the work), it is an okay "quick read" that might be informative on a number of topics related to keeping a cat in health and happiness, as a very introductory volume. But it definitely is just a primer, not a reference work. The library-market pricing is ludicrous at over US$20 for a book really worth about $7 or so (and I pity the fool who actually falls for one of the crazy $140+ prices). You are much better off obtaining "The Cornell Book of Cats" or one of its comparable competitors, and getting your Manx breed-specific information online, e.g. from the CFA's Manx Breed Council (ManxBC.org).
About the reviewer: While not a breeder, I've had Manx all my life, off and on, both in Europe and North America, including sub-breeds like the (probably extinct) Miniature Manx, an experimental American variety back the 1980s, and right now the Cymric or Longhair Manx (my Ramsey Gyatso is a colorpoint Cymric). So, I don't want to sound like I have something against Manx cats. They're a delightful breed when properly bred, held by the breeder until late kittenhood to weed out those with obvious problems, and examined by a veterinarian again as they approach adulthood. I am also not a zoologist, geneticist, veterinarian or biologist, but I do have a degree in anthropology, with a concomitant background in the life sciences. I'm also a long-time (beginning ca. 1994) subscriber to "Cat Fancy" and certainly have nothing personal against the author. I just don't think this book is worth the price, nor entirely reliable on its genetic information even if better than most of the other short Manx cat books in print. Being "less bad", though, isn't much of a recommendation.
See all 8 customer reviews on Amazon.com
|
| | |
