We have taken a LOT of photos of our Tonks over the years. Here are some of the best.
Lots of information on Tonkinese cats, culled from many sources and our own years of experience.
Pictures sent in by the owners of our babies.
Presented just for history sake, and a few cute photos.
Want a kitten? Have a question? Start here with our most frequently asked questions.
Drop us a note at deborah@tonkinesekitten.com
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Posted 2009-12-07 by Don
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You know the hardest part of my job on this site, besides coding and photography? Trying to come up with clever banter to accompany the pictures we want to post.
Deborah has not been feeling well, I have not been feeling well, but the kittens are absolutely adorable and virtually demanding to have cute pictures taken of themselves and posted to our site. They are at the perfect age where they eat dry food, drink from a bowl of water, use the litter box, and are still agonizingly cute animated balls of hellion-fluff that love to sleep with us, paw through our hair, run up my jeans, etc. So, since I had to take some close-ups today for a lady that needed to see their eye color I thought I would go ahead and share them with the rest of you. These are not, by any possible reckoning, some of our best photography work. The poses for two of them consisted of sneaking up on them while they were resting quietly and "PSSSTT!"ing in their face until their eyes were open, and the other two just got picked up in one hand and shot with the camera in the other hand close to a nearby window with BARELY adequate light.
And yet, they are still squee-inducingly cute. That just how they roll, yo.
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Posted 2009-11-26 by Don
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For those who follow the site frequently, hoping that we will post more pictures of the current litter and waiting for your turn to come on our waiting list, you may be closer than you think. This litter we have had a record number of last-minute cancellations, due primarily to the harsh economy. Some people got on our list almost two years ago when times were rosier, and since then they have found they cannot easily afford one of our kittens for one reason or another, so they have regretfully had to back out. This means that those of you who contacted us in recent months and were told that you would probably have to wait several months may find you are father up the list than either of us dreamed of. For those of you who have not contacted us because you assumed you stood no chance of getting a kitten anytime soon, you might want to reconsider and ask to be included on the waiting list. You never know!
Once again the pic of the day includes Tucket, who lately seems to always be cuddled with a photogenic baby. Her grandma genes seem to have kicked in to high gear recently; she was always doting and attentive, but in the last few days she has spent almost all her free time sleeping with the babies. Ariel certainly appreciates the babysitter, and the babies appreciate having constant attention... they are never more than a few seconds from having one or both mothers tending to their every need. Yet another reason why we have the sweetest, most social, best adjusted kittens of any breeder you will EVER encounter. :)
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Posted 2009-11-25 by Don
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I am in the middle of a massive site redesign. This site has been more or less the same for the last few years, and times have changed to the point that it no longer meets all of our needs, so I am working on implementing a new content management system that will allow for all sorts of cool features which will enable our visitors to engage with us better. We will have a comment system, so that you can leave messages in reponse to our news postings. We will support RSS feeds, so that you can receive notification that we have posted a new piece of news, article, picture or whatever. The new system will also make it a jillion times easier for Deborah to post on her own and without needing to funnel everything through me (yes, I admit it, I am sometimes the bottleneck). We intend to start offering merchandise, primarily in the form of photo prints of our best images. One of the most profound changes, for me personally, is that we will start running small banner and text ads along with our news and articles; I resisted this for years on high moral grounds, but it seems I am just an old Luddite and I really need to get with the modern times, as I have read articles and studies that indicate most web users do not have a problem with inoffensive and unobtrusive advertising since it is now the norm everywhere. So, keep an eye out for this site to undergo a major facelift sometime before the end of the year.
Today's "awwwww" moment is of Tucket and three of the kittens all cuddled together, sleeping (and shedding hair) on a pile of clean laundry fresh out of the dryer. There is no greater cat magnet than warm linen. :)
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Posted 2009-11-23 by Don
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This afternoon all the cats and kittens were curled up together, napping, and I managed to get this shot of a Platinum baby watching me sneak up on them to capture the cuteness. As you can see my sneaking leaves something to be desired, as the baby caught me from quite a ways off and kept a lazy eye on me as I jockeyed around trying to find the best angle for some pictures. Clearly they are accustomed to me trying to sneak around while snapping photos because they rarely move, wake up or otherwise acknowledge my presence other than to lift an eyelid or two... and even then they usually get bored of hearing the shutter sound so they go right back to sleep. Would that all our lives were so simple and contented!
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Posted 2009-11-21 by Don
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Deborah and I have a very ambitious goal; to try posting updates to the site daily. Given our track record it isn't going to be easy, and we have already skipped a day here and there since we started the plan, but at least we are posting a great deal more than in the past. Part of the reason is that we appear to be at the top of the Google search results for various keywords related to Tonkinese cats, so we would like to improve our hit rate by actually having more content. The other part of the reason is we have been explicitly asked to post more often by people who have been visiting our site regularly. We'll try not to let you folks down, and thank you for the kind words (and motivation)!
This is a recent shot of Ariel taking over my bed and nursing the kittens. Notice that, mass-wise, they collectively are as big or bigger than their mother! KMR is like "kitty growth hormone"... it will pump [clap] you up!
And before any outraged pet lovers contact us, no, KMR does not contain growth hormones. Some of you may find the joke obvious, but others may not and I don't need any angry E-mails! ;)
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Posted 2009-11-20 by Don
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Once again I was taking pictures while the babies were gobbling KMR. This Platinum boy looked awfully cute nestled in some blankets, grooming himself in a contented way with a full belly, so I figured I'd post it. Enjoy.
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Posted 2009-11-17 by Don
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Tonight I was snapping a few pix after the babies had their evening KMR, and this one really stood out due to the nice combination of blankets and piercing blue eyes. I am pretty sure this is the Blue mink boy, who stands a reasonably good chance at keeping his blue eyes for life, although probably not quite so vividly "the spice must flow" Fremen blue-in-blue like he (and all the babies) are born with. I wonder if the "M" in KMR is melange? ;) |
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Posted 2009-11-15 by Don
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For the last couple of days we have started supplementing Ariel's milk with KMR, a milk supplement designed for kittens. We are often asked "Why do you do that? I had a cat that had kittens, and they turned out just fine on nothing but mothers milk!". The answer is simple. Of course we don't HAVE to do it... we do it because we are not interested in the kittens merely surviving, we want them to thrive! By giving them milk supplements we provide them with far more nutrition than one mother cat could possibly produce, and this is why our 8-week-old kittens look like 20-week-old horses to the casual observer! They don't get fat from it, they simply convert it into bone and muscle and overall mass. When our kittens leave the house they are not just ready to survive, they are ready to kick ass, take names and seek their fortune in the world! How does THAT compare with your scrawny twig-kittens you raised in ignorance when you were 7 years old? (hint: our kittens would pwn your kittens)
Here we see a slighty-over-4-week-old baby feeding from a 3ml syringe. This is the first step; introduce something like a nipple. In about a week they will grow impatient waiting for us to refill the syringe, and will start drinking directly from the bowl. BTW, don't worry about the baby's messy face... Tucket is just out of the shot, waiting patiently to clean each baby as we finish with it. Altruistic? Hell no. She loves to lick the milk off them because she loves KMR. :)
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Posted 2009-11-13 by Don
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Deborah has been wanting to get more comfortable with my pro SLR, the camera responsible for most of the pictures we post, so today she is doing the shooting and I am doing the kitten wrangling! As a pro photographer I am somewhat psychotic about the quality of pictures we post here, but I think she did a very good job considering she has hardly even held my camera much less tried to use it before. The upside to her practicing with my gear is that there ought to be a lot more photos posted, something I know some of you reading this will be very appreciative for. Sorry for the glaringly mauve laundry basket in both shots, but this was a very impromptu photo shoot and we needed to block off their escape so I grabbed the first thing at hand.
In honor of Deborah's first go, we are posting TWO of her pictures instead of my customary ONE. The first one shows what a 4 week old kitten thinks of kisses (and yes, it left a mark), and the second one was taken 0.001 seconds after I unleashed all of them at once... you have to shoot quick because they don't stick around long, and with 4 of them you can bet they will all go different directions at once, thereby ruining any chance at getting another decent group photo. Staged? Yes. Mindnumbingly cute? Oh yes.
One tiny bit of web site news: I moved all of the posts dating up to late 2008 on to the "old news" page. Every so often I have to do this so that we don't have a ridiculous number of pictures on this page, which slows down the loading times. Regular visitors need not worry; if we post something it will never be taken down, just moved. |
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Posted 2009-11-12 by Deborah
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Here is a blue mink baby very happily taking a nap on my shoulder. He decided to groom me first, licking me for at least five minutes with his tiny tongue (apparently, I am quite tasty) and then curled up and fell fast asleep. He slept through all the camera clicking and flash (kittens usually prefer to thwart picture taking by instantly waking up from cute sleeping poses at the first click) and in fact, didn't budge until my bladder was threatening to explode, and I was forced to get up and gently put him with his mother. He still mewed such a plaintive protest that I felt horribly guilty--but I had no other options, especially since maintaining my position and losing bladder control would have been very unfair to the other cat nestled in my lap. ;) |
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Posted 2009-11-03 by Don
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Maaaaan, baby kittens are too much fun! Absolutely the best part about raising kittens is that we get to play with them for 2-3 months before they go out into the world to seek their fortune. The babies will be 3 weeks old as of tomorrow, and they finally know how to use their eyes and ears to build up a picture of their environment. They toddle rather steadily, and even show early signs of hopping. We noticed a couple of days ago that they know how to play with each other, which is currently limited to casual swatting and gentle chewing but will soon escalate to fierce paddle-battles and screams of anger when a sibling chomps too hard. Actually, paddle-battles is one of the first thing a kitten learns and begins at roughly 3 days old... how else you gonna defend your assigned nipple against incursion? |
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Posted 2009-10-27 by Don
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Here is the first "awwwwwww" picture of the most recent litter. Ariel stayed in the carefully constructed "baby birfin' box" for all of two days before deciding that she needed to move them around to throw off any potential roaming packs of dingos, and then she spent about two days in the painstakingly excavated and luxuriously appointed area underneath a dresser in our living room, and then spent about two days halfway across the room in the relocated and re-appointed birfin' box, before finally deciding she would just shove them all BEHIND the birfin' box. Well, we learned a very long time ago that it is best to simply accommodate the mother and trim out the area with sheets and blankets rather than force her to go where she doesn't want to go... because quite frankly her will is far stronger than ours.
Here are all four babies, two boys and two girls. I was walking past them when I saw the way she was cuddling the one under her arm, and I grabbed the camera as fast (and quietly) as I could to get this fairly cute family scene. Now that they are 2 weeks old we will start playing with them more, and the quality of my compositions will improve dramatically, so keep an eye peeled for updates in the next few days.
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Posted 2009-10-15 by Don
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Baaaaaabiez!!
Ariel has done it again! Last night she delivered a litter of extremely healthy (read: giant) kittens, and they are all doing fantastically. It just keeps getting easier and easier for her, and this litter slid out like she had Teflon innards! She delivered in the "birthing box" we set up for her, but thanks to Tucket urping in the box this morning Ariel decided she needed to move the babies under a nearby dresser until we could prepare her usual, more long-term home; we remove a drawer from the bottom of an antique dresser which has no bottom, and we line the area with sheets. It will take the babies about 3-4 weeks before they start to toddle out, but when they do she stops trying to hide them and just lets them go where they will.
Here is one of the first "out of the chute", still very pink and very wet.
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Posted 2009-01-31 by Deborah
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Even though the Rundle-Bundle invented driving the shoe on his own and made many a fine excursion in his choice of shoecar, when Don was finally ready to get around to take some good pix, he wasn't really in the mood, so in the interests of total honesty, this picture was staged, and took about 20 shots to get a couple good ones. Oh well. I think all of the other pictures on this site are true action kitten candids.
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Posted 2009-01-08 by Deborah
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Here are some pictures of Ariel's babies. They are sturdy, healthy kittens, and now that weaning has begun they are drinking huge amounts of the special kitten milk. The blue Teddy kitten in particular is a little elephant--he is growing so quickly that he looks at least a couple weeks older than he actually is. Here we see three little kittens waking up from a nap. Two blue mink boys and one platinum girl (point or mink, too early to tell which yet).
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Little platinum girl plays peek-a-boo.
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Contented mother Ariel lounges with her three little kittens.
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The two blue boys curled up together. Look big Puffy Teddy is, especially compared to Rundle, who is only slightly runty at this point, but his enormous brother makes him look much smaller by comparison. The little girl is "average" size, and Runty is about as big as she is now.
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Blue mink Puff Teddy with his platinum sister snuggled up to him. You can just see her part of her head, as he is lying on top of most of her.
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The Rundle "driving" the shoe, and thinking about doing a drive-by swip at his sister. Rundle really enjoys playing in the shoe, and often sits up in it like he is driving a little car. He likes the extra height this perch gives him, especially for making kitten swip attacks at nearby siblings.
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Posted 2008-11-28 by Don
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Ariel has bred again! GO ARIEL!
Ariel delivered on November 16th, and we have 3 healthy and happy bibbins to share with the world! As mentioned (often) on this site we will keep them until they are about 10-12 weeks old, at which point even the smallest of them should be ready to make its way in the world. We believe we have homes lined up already, which is why you have to get on the waiting list ASAP if you ever want one of our wee ones.
Here is a shot of Ariel and two of the babies, taken a couple of days after they were born and basking in the glory of their heated box. All of them have opened their eyes as of today so I will post some excruciatingly cute shots of them peering at the world, trying to make sense of the blurry smudges, in the next few days.
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