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Having your new home custom designed to your specifications sounds like a pretty good idea. What’s involved?

While it might be easier to choose a standard design on offer from your local home builder, some of us would like a unique home that reflects our individuality. But is it really worth going through the process of designing everything from the ground up?

Susan Briggs thinks so. When she and her husband Nigel decided to bite the bullet, demolish their 1950s Perth home, and build a new one, they sought a builder who would love their unusual block the same way they did.

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Whitley Chapel, Northumberland Water drains from surrounding sandy banks into a peaty bowl where it is held by underlying clay

The area south of Hexham known as the Shire is an undulating landscape of fields and woods threaded by minor roads. It has a homely quality, a hint of Tolkien’s Shire. Among its small settlements is Whitley Chapel, where the church of St Helen squats on the knoll of Chapel Hill.

In the 17th century the Society of Friends held their meetings on Chapel Hill and the boggy area below it was known as Quakers’ Hollow, now Quakers’ Hole. Two farms border this semi-natural wetland, Moss House and Mire House, their names speaking of the terrain, ”moss” being a Northumbrian word for a bog.

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The Scottish Fold is a lovely cat, but unfortunately suffers from health problems related to its breeding. Cat image from www.shutterstock.com

Cats are one of the world’s favourite pets, but in our efforts to breed more attractive felines, we are metaphorically loving them to death.

Like British Bulldogs and extreme styles of pigeons, some cats bred to please a human sense of beauty suffer from serious health problems. This is the case for a particularly lovely cat, the Scottish Fold.

It has long been known that breeding Scottish Folds risks health problems, but research is mounting that it is impossible to mitigate this risk. It is time to ban the breeding of this type of cat, as other nations have done.

Why so cute?

The Scottish Fold is a rare feline breed. It originated when a naturally occuring mutant cat was born in Scotland during the last century, at a farm near Coupar Angus in Perthshire. The cat had forward-folding ears because her ear cartilage wasn’t rigid enough to support her ears.

Her name was Susie and she looked cute. Cute enough that, in a great UK tradition, they wanted to preserve the mutation by breeding her with British short-haired cats and local farm cats. And so the Scottish Fold was born.

Why do people like cats with floppy ears? Many authorities think this is because of the Lorenzian theory of beauty, named in honour of Konrad Lorenz who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on ethology, the study of animal behaviour.

Most people, especially children, find a round face resembling that of a human comforting, whereas the longer snout and erect ears (of, say, a wolf) is potentially frightening. For this reason, many people find the appearance of owls pleasing to the eye, which is why they have owl cafes in Tokyo, and why so many people collect owl figurines.

So a Scottish Fold looks owl-like, and for many people this is a highly desirable trait.

Tracing the mutation

It didn’t take long for veterinarians and scientists to figure out that if the cartilage in the ear was defective, then cartilage in the joints might also be dodgy. The British geneticist Oliphant Jackson demonstrated this unequivocally in a most elegant series of classic genetic and radiological experiments in a hospital basement in the 1970s.

Cats, like people, have two copies of most genes. Jackson showed that cats like Susie (and her daughter Snooks), which both had a single copy of the postulated defective gene, were reasonably normal.

In contrast, cats with two copies of the dud gene developed crippling arthritis from an early age. Sensibly, Jackson suggested the breeding of such cats be banned, and that’s what happened in the UK and France.

But some Scottish Folds were exported to the US. Unfortunately, in that jurisdiction breeding was allowed, with the proviso that a Scottish Fold only be mated to a Scottish Shorthair (a normal cat with a similar genetic background, but with normal ears and hence normal cartilage). This type of mating resulted in half of each litter of kittens (on average) having folded ears, the other half being Scottish Shorthairs. And so the breed went on.

In the early 1990s a group of Australian veterinarians demonstrated convincingly that all Scottish Fold cats have abnormal bone development of their distal limbs. This is generally associated with early onset and accelerated progression of osteoarthritis (degenerative joint disease) in joints of the distal limbs and tail. The ankle and wrist were the joints most obviously affected, especially the ankles.

In time all Folds develop adverse changes. This work was confirmed and extended subsequently by Japanese and Korean investigators. Yet Scottish Folds are still bred in the US, Asia and even Australia.

Two years ago a collaboration between Australian, European and American researchers uncovered the science behind the problem. Their research was recently published in the journal Osteoarthritis and Cartilage.

The problem lies in a gene that affects cells involved with pressure and pain sensing within cartilage. Children with a very similar genetic defect have comparable bone deformities to affected Scottish Fold cats.

What does this mean for the cats?

Scottish Shorthairs have normal ears and are completely healthy. They are lovely, sweet-natured cats.

Scottish Folds have shortened limbs, an abnormal gait, a peculiar and sometimes stiff or painful tail, and the propensity to develop osteoarthritis at an earlier age. This causes variable lameness (often severe) and secondary deformity.

The truth is, we have known since Jackson’s work in the 1970s that breeding Scottish Fold cats is ethically indefensible.

Yet the practice has continued in most jurisdictions, with cat breeders and veterinarians turning a blind eye to the frequently obvious problems.

While there are still questions to be answered, we already possess sufficient information to know that breeding these cats is cruel. Vets and cat breeders who condone this practice have no scientific basis with which to defend this practice. They are not breeding cats – they are perpetuating a disease state.

What to do

The breeding of Scottish Folds has been effectively banned in Victoria. It should be the same in every state of Australia and every country overseas.

In my opinion, the RPSCA should seek out people who advertise these cats for sale and prosecute them.

We cannot condone breeding cats because it’s in our nature to think they are cute, when pain and suffering will afflict a substantial proportion of these cats for much of their life, with ongoing requirements for medication and sometimes even radiation therapy or surgery.

Scottish Shorthairs have the same sweet personality and behavioural features of Scottish Folds, but they don’t get the joint issues. These could be bred and shown in the place of the Folds. They are lovely cats.

The solution is that simple. It’s time to stop pussyfooting around.

Richard Malik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The impending closure of the big Hazelwood brown coal generator in Victoria could provide the impetus for the construction of the first large scale solar tower and storage project in Australia.

Qld Court of Appeal sides against climate and with Rinehart, state govt, who argue coal from other mines would substitute environmental damage of Alpha if it didn't go ahead.

Negotiating the realities of a changing climate and its impact on horticultural crops.

Queensland court of appeal finds ‘proposed mining would not detrimentally affect global greenhouse gas emissions’ because Asian power stations would buy coal elsewhere if Alpha blocked

Miners could run afoul of Queensland’s environmental protection laws if the burning of their export coal overseas were shown to negatively impact global carbon pollution, the state’s highest court has ruled.

But the court of appeal has dismissed a challenge to Gina Rinehart’s Alpha mine because of an earlier land court finding that it would “not detrimentally affect global greenhouse gas emissions” because Asian power stations would simply buy coal elsewhere if the mine were blocked.

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World’s biggest solar module supplier JinkoSolar says Australian solar market set for rebound as households adopt battery storage, and large scale sector takes off.

Former prime minister says commercial shark fishery should be considered for north coast of New South Wales

Tony Abbott has called for nets to be put in place to protect beachgoers in regional New South Wales, saying he is on the side of people rather than sharks, after a teenager was bitten while surfing.

The former prime minister has argued that it was unfair nets were in place off metropolitan beaches but not regional ones.

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Reports in the local Chinese media suggest that a record-low bid of 0.52 yuan/kWh for solar has been accepted in Inner Mongolia.

72% of Australians believe it is inevitable the country’s current coal-fired power stations will be closed and replaced with renewable energy. The real question is, how should we manage this transition?

Current greenhouse gas concentrations could warm the world 3-7℃ (and on average 5℃) over coming millennia.

China installed a wind turbine every hour and filled a football field full of solar panels every hour last year.

While we don’t know whether Hazelwood will close yet, we do know that Australia could easily replace the energy, and it could make a substantial difference to our carbon emissions.

Tiny plastic particles released by synthetic fabrics can cause harm to marine life when they enter rivers and oceans

Each cycle of a washing machine could release more than 700,000 microscopic plastic fibres into the environment, according to a study.

Related: Inside the lonely fight against the biggest environmental problem you've never heard of

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STAR WARS SCIENCE: Australian scientists have created their own version of a Star Wars scene by stopping light in a cloud of very cold atoms, a development that provides a essential building block for quantum computing.

Committee on Climate Change chair urges UK to bring in new laws to replace EU legislation and says Scotland must do more to prepare for global warming

The UK must not water down its environmental laws as it leaves the European Union, one of the government’s most senior advisers on climate change has warned.

Lord Krebs, chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), told the Guardian: “It will be absolutely crucial that governments in the UK replace European legislation and don’t see this as an opportunity to say we can now have dirtier vehicles or less efficient household appliances.”

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Two million years of climate records stored in ocean sediment cores point to three to seven degrees Celsius long term temperature rise at current levels of atmospheric carbon.

Nasa says jets of water spotted spurting from Jupiter's moon, Europa, take them a step closer to finding out if there is life in space.

The world's biggest conference on the international wildlife trade has begun in Johannesburg with the plight of Africa's elephants, targeted for their tusks, at the centre of heated talks.