Ragdoll

The ragdoll does something in greeting that almost no cat in the world does: when you take it in your arms, it simply gives up. The muscles soften, the paws hang, the whole great body spreads out in your arms like a warm blanket — and it was from this limp “flop” that the breed took its name: ragdoll, a rag doll. Other cats in such a situation negotiate, squirm, or politely stiffen. The ragdoll surrenders its entire weight to you from the first second, as if it wanted to say: do as you see fit, I trust you. And that sentence is the key to this whole breed.

For a cat with the soul of an angel, the ragdoll has a surprisingly colorful record. The breed arose in the 1960s in California, with the breeder Ann Baker, from a white cat named Josephine — and its beginnings were accompanied by so many legends that they would suffice for a TV series. Baker even claimed that her cats felt no pain, and — perhaps most extraordinary of all — she reserved the name “Ragdoll” like a trademark: it is probably the only cat breed in history that someone tried to patent like a brand of jeans. The marketing was eccentric, but the cat itself turned out to be a masterpiece: large, gorgeous, with blue eyes and a character that conquered the world faster than any legends.

Because the ragdoll really is different. It greets you at the door like someone who has been waiting all day (because it has). It assists at every household task: it supervises the dishwashing, roots for the cooking, reviews the folding of laundry from a reclining position on the freshly folded laundry. Strangers it treats as friends it simply has not met yet. And those great, blue eyes look at the world with an expression of gentle astonishment that anyone could have bad intentions. This is a cat that does not know the concept of suspicion — and that makes it at once wonderful and utterly defenseless.

And here let us return for a moment to that legend, because it must be set straight once and for all: the ragdoll feels pain exactly the same as any other cat. It simply does not defend itself. That famous limpness is not numbness, but trust taken to the limit — the ragdoll assumes in advance that in your hands nothing bad can happen to it. Such trust is an honor, but also an obligation: this is a cat exclusively for life indoors, because its gentleness knows nothing of the street, strange dogs, or busy intersections. The outside world plays a game whose rules the ragdoll does not even know. You are its rules.

This obligation reaches deeper too — literally to the heart. Ragdolls belong to the breeds in which a specific gene mutation responsible for familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), the most common heart disease in cats, has been identified. The good news: breeders can test their cats with a genetic test — ask about the parents' results — and conscious care makes an enormous difference.

Because the ragdoll is a cat that reverses the usual feline order: it does not make you earn anything, does not put you to the test, has no probation period. All the trust it has, it gives you on the first day — and for a dozen or more years it does not once check whether it has perhaps made a mistake.

Your role is exactly as in that greeting scene: in your arms it surrenders its entire weight to you, literally and figuratively. Hold it well. It does not for a moment doubt that you are holding.