Ragdoll Cats

The story of Ragdoll started in Riverside, California, around 1965, thanks to the work of Mrs. Ann Baker. It is known that the ancestor of all ragdoll is a long haired white cat (Josephine), who had a wild and independent character and lived free outside. Hit by a car and cured with love from the state of coma, she survived the accident and had a wonderful twist: her character began to change.
Usually rather unfriendly, later the cat would become exceptionally docile and sweet, giving birth to a litter of amazingly submissive kittens!

From the first post-accident litter four kittens were born: two were black and two were colourpoint. These last two had become the progenitor of all the Ragdoll.

Despite many imaginative claims, genetic experts determined that the Baker made a careful selection process, building the new race in a few years. It seems likely that the first Ragdoll were born from the intersection of Josephine with a colourpoint cat, which we do not know the origins. Some people say it was a Burmese or a Himalayan, but this statement is inexact, since its obvious from careful genetic tests that there is a dominant gene that gives the white coloring in the mitted-spotting Ragdoll, and this gene does not exist in the Burmese breed. Careful selection, carried out with inbreeding led, over the years, to a stable and well-defined genetic heritage.

Baker patented the new race in the year 1975 and called her cattery “Raggedy Ann Ragdolls” breeding, getting to register a very strict breeding program, which preserved the purity of the breed. When Josephine the cat died, she bequeathed to Mrs. Baker the three essential cats for the dynasty of all Ragdoll existing today: Daddy Warbucks, the forefather of mitted variety (according to Ann, the original look of the breed), Buckwheat, who started the colourpoint variety, and Fugianna a bicolor female.