Beautiful picture of a rare snow-white deaf Maine Coon

I recently wrote about white cats being bad mothers! The reasoning is straightforward: white cats are often deaf and being deaf they cannot respond in a timely way to their kitten's cries for attention. This is a barrier to being a good mother.

And my mind turned to a photograph by Helmi Flick, a very well-known American show cat photographer, of a white Maine Coon cat. As I recall it was one of her first assignments as a professional cat photographer. She peached it and got a great result.

It is as if the cat is floating like a cloud against a deep blue sky. She used an Olympus camera. She uses Canon nowadays or did. She lives in Fort Worth metroplex, Dallas, Texas.

I'm told that this cat was or is (if still alive) deaf. That would have to be expected. The chances of being deaf depends upon whether the cat has two blue eyes, odd-eyes i.e. one yellow and one blue or both yellow. 

A high proportion of all-white cats with two blue eyes will be deaf because the cochlea of the inner ear degenerates shortly after birth. It becomes irreparable and of no use. There is no cure.

But this is a beautiful cat. I've not seen an all-white Maine Coon cat other than this one and this photograph goes back at least 15 years. That is a long time on the internet, isn't it?

This is a Maine Coon cat that has not been bred to an extreme appearance. You can see the fairly moderate features. 

This is a classic Maine Coon which probably pretty accurately fits the CFA and TICA breed standards.