Chocolate Cat Names, Names for Chocolate Kittens, Page 5

Chocolate is a genotype before it is a color. At the B locus — the gene TYRP1, which codes for an enzyme in eumelanin synthesis — three alleles produce three coats: B/B or B/b is black, b/b is chocolate, bl/bl is cinnamon. The b allele yields a partial-function enzyme, which is why a chocolate cat reads as a deep solid brown instead of full black. Schmidt-Küntzel and colleagues sequenced the TYRP1 mutations in cats in 2005.

Two breeds carry the chocolate canon. The Havana Brown was created in 1950s England specifically to fix b/b in a foreign-type cat — foundation crosses of Siamese with black domestic shorthairs, refined with chocolate-pointed Siamese and Russian Blues. CFA registered the breed in 1959 and granted Championship in 1964. The Burmese sable traces to a single founder, Wong Mau, brought from the Burma-Thailand border to Dr. Joseph G. Thompson in San Francisco in 1930. Bred to a seal-point Siamese in 1932, she produced the solid dark chocolate-brown offspring that bred true.

Cinnamon — the rarer bl/bl variant — was first deliberately bred into a non-Abyssinian breed in 1960, when Siamese breeder Pam Evely crossed her Seal Point Annelida Fair Maid with a sorrel Abyssinian stud, Tranby Red Tutankhamen, producing Southview Pavane. Early cinnamon Orientals were called 'Pavanes' for years afterward. In sunlight, cinnamon shows a warm orange undertone that distinguishes it from chocolate's cooler register.

The two breed canons cross-link directly: our Havana Brown cat names list inherits the cigar-and-rabbit naming tradition the breed's founders built in 1950s England, and our Burmese cat names list traces back to Wong Mau and the original 1930 founding stock. Both are b/b breeds with naming canons tied to their founding stories.