is nearly extinct in its homeland, the Isle of Man, being bred out by the imported cats of British and other immigrants, though the standardised form developed from the landrace is common and popular around the world. Similar threats to the Van cat have impelled the Turkish government to hastily set up an official breeding programme to save it in a more pure form than the weakly related Turkish Van and Turkish Angora standardised breeds which bear little resemblance to the landrace feral populations of Van city and the Lake Van area. Modern Sokoke breed History The Sokoke is a "natural breed", i.e., one developed and standardised from the local, free-breeding landrace population, and thus distinct from it by virtue of careful selective breeding for specific, fixed traits believed to epitomise the distinctions evolved by natural selection in the original population. As British cat geneticist and pedigree judge Pat Turner wrote in 1993, in the early days of recognition of the breed's standardisation, the fixing of traits like large "wild-looking" spots that are distinct from other blotched breeds "can only be done by selective breeding". The breeding programme was begun in 1978 by Jeni Slater, who originally named the breed the African Shorthair. She used cats found in and around Watamu, both raised from kittenhood and enticed from the adult feral population with food rewards. Gloria Moeldrop, a friend of Slater's, brought a pair of Slater's cats home with her to Denmark to breed in 1983, because Slater feared for the survival of the native cat in Kenya. The cats were first shown in Copenhagen in 1984, then in Odense. Slater introduced a darker Watamu street cat specimen into the breeding programme, in 1987, for genetic diversity. Breeder and North American Sokoke Association officer Pat Longley has suggested that this cat introduced the lynx point pattern seen in some Sokokes. In 1989, Moeldrop imported more cats from Kenya to strengthen her European breeding stock. Slater also provided at least one to a breeder named Bob Schwartz, in Italy. Jeannie Knocker, an Englishwoman residing near Slater in Kenya, gathered several feral cats near the borders of the forest and kept them penned, producing litters that were exported to the US and Europe, registered to establish future pedigrees, and bred; these became known as the "new line" Sokoke cats, with distinctive features from those of the Slater-developed "old line". The cats caught