What’s the breed of your cat?
Since I wrote a few articles about cat breeds (for example, on the differences between Maine Coon and Norwegian Forest cats, Siberian and Norwegian Forest cats or Ragdoll and Birman), many people started asking me the fatidic question: “What is the breed of my cat?”, while attaching a few pictures of their cat. I’ll be clear from the start: if you are asking yourself this question, your cat doesn’t have a breed. If you’re then wondering “I know, but I want to know what my cat is mixed with”, in the huge majority of cases, your cat isn’t even mixed with any breed! Now, let’s get to the heart of the subject: I’m going to explain different concepts about the origins of cat breeds, DNA tests, and the confusion between colors and breeds.
Pedigree and mixed breed
How do I know that your cat doesn’t have a breed? It’s simple, if your cat has a breed, it will have a pedigree to prove it. If it doesn’t have a pedigree your cat doesn’t belong to a breed.
And if your cat had a pedigree, you would know it already.
To have a breed, a cat needs to have a pedigree. A pedigree is a registration paper that certifies that the cat is from the said breed and contains the genealogy of the cat (generally 3 to 5 generations), so you can see that the parents of the cat were themselves from that breed. For it to be reliable, a pedigree is generally issued by a reputable cat breed registry such as the TICA, Fifé, WCF, LOOF, CFA…
So, if your cat has a breed you will know it, as you will actually have a pedigree certifying that. Otherwise, your cat is either a Domestic Shorthair (DSH) or a Domestic Longhair (DLH), depending on the fur length.
Now, let’s talk about mixed breeds and why your cat is very probably not mixed with any breed. I think that this misconception comes from a difference between cats and dogs.
Dogs were domesticated around 20 000 to 40 000 years ago, and they were domesticated for a purpose: hunting, herding sheep, guarding a house, etc. These dogs were selectively bred to favor physical characteristics and behaviors adapted to their activity.
Nowadays, the majority of dogs are companion animals, and the “mutt” or “mixed breed” dogs have ancestors which had a breed and were bred for a purpose.
Cats, however, weren’t domesticated like dogs. Presumably, cats domesticated themselves as they are attracted to mice, which were themselves attracted to our grain storage. This exchange of service (cats eating the mice that humans attracted with their food) led to the domestication of cats. Contrary to dogs though, humans barely intervened in cat breeding until very recently, around 150 years ago. The oldest cat breeds are ~150 years old, but the majority of them were developed since the 60’s! And while there are more than 350 dog breeds, there are only around 40-70 cat breeds, depending on the cat registry.
So, while dogs were selected into breeds and then mixed later on, cats are still in majority “untouched” in the sense that humans didn’t have an influence on their breeding. For this reason, cats are often considered as “semi-domesticated”.
The current cat breeds were created by selecting a large number of “foundation” cats with some specific physical criteria in mind. Cats with a pedigree are a minority, as only around 1-3% of cats belong to a breed, while 97-99% are domestic cats that reproduced without human intervention.
So, the majority of cats won’t have any pedigree cats as ancestors. On the contrary, pedigree cats have all domestic ancestors. The breeds are so recent that with the pedigrees and websites such as Pawpeds you can often actually trace back to the foundation cats of the breed!
Of course, there are exceptions to this. Some careless owners could have let some pedigree cats reproduce with neighboring domestic cats or willingly reproduce their cats with domestic cats. However, these are generally rare occurrences, mainly because of the rarity of pedigree cats. To give you some numbers, in France, between 2003 and 2019, there were 2579 Russian Blue kittens born, while the total cat population in France is estimated to be 14 million cats. You can see how low the probability would be for a domestic cat to actually be cross-bred with one of these two thousand Russian Blue cats!
This diagram is inspired from Orca Starbuck on the Facebook group Cats Genetics
The look
Something that I often hear is things such as “my cat totally looks like a Maine Coon: he is big, has longhair and lynx tips so he must be a Maine Coon”.
There is a huge lack of awareness around cat breeds. The breeds are defined by a standard, which is a set of physical characteristics that the “ideal” cat of the breed should reach. However, people are mostly unaware of these standards and are often able to recognize only the main characteristics of the breed. So while it's true that a Maine Coon is a large cat with long fur and lynx-tips, these characteristics could also apply to a Norwegian Forest cat or a Siberian. There is much more than that in the standard: there are characteristics such as a square muzzle, high and prominent cheekbones, ears that should be large, wide at the base, moderately pointed and set high on the head with a slight outward tilt, large and slightly oval eyes… The list goes on, and most of these characteristics are difficult to notice or even understand when you are a novice. Keep in mind that cat breeds are much more than their “famous” characteristics. When you think that your cat might look like a cat from a specific breed, a breeder (or someone with a trained eye) might have a completely different opinion.
If you want to know more about the standards for each breed, they are available on the websites of all the main cat registries such as Fife, TICA…
The color
The last misunderstanding around breeds is the difference between cat coat colors and breeds. As explained previously, not all cats have a breed, as the majority of cats are domestic cats without a pedigree. However, all cats have a coat color. The coat color is simply the description of the cat's physical color. Terms such as tabby, tortie, bicolor are often confused as breed names but are, in fact, part of the coat color. To know more about cat coats, I made a series of articles on the subject, which will help you find the color of your cat.
While a domestic cat can be any of the possible colors, some breeds are restricted to certain coats. Famous examples are the Russian Blue or Chartreux which exist only in blue, or the Siamese breed which exists only in the colorpoint pattern. If your cat has the same color as a pedigree cat, it doesn’t make it belong to that breed: while all Siamese are colorpoint, not all colorpoint cats are Siamese. Additionally, being colorpoint doesn’t mean that your cat is mixed with a Siamese: it’s just a gene that is widespread in the domestic cat population.
To summarize, your cat coat color doesn’t give you any information on the breed, but it gives you extra information on your cat!
The DNA
Now, let’s talk about cat DNA tests: there are no breed tests available for cats. Basepaws, which advertises its cat DNA test, isn’t in fact a breed test. They don’t tell you what is the breed or “breed mix” of your cat, but they tell you what is the DNA similarity to some of the cat breeds. The accuracy is also not that great: Néline, my Norwegian Forest cat with a pedigree, tested only 20% similar to a Norwegian Forest cat according to Basepaws!
You can’t DNA test your cat for a breed, for the very simple reason that the majority of cats don't have any pedigree ancestors.
What can indeed be identified is the breed groups which are mainly geographies such as Asian, Western European, East African, Mediterranean basin.
If you are interested to know about the breed of your cat for health reasons, you can do a DNA test for health markers, no matter the breed of your cat. The best thing to do would be to ask your vet which test they’d recommend.
The issue with mislabelling
Finally, I want to give you some insights on why labeling cats correctly is important. Cat breeds are not as extreme as dog breeds and it can be difficult to recognize them for a novice: mislabelling just reinforces this phenomenon. In fact, you will never know what an actual Maine Coon or Siamese cat looks like if you see only mislabeled domestic cats.
This lack of knowledge benefits backyard breeders and malicious people, who will easily sell any domestics cats as a breed. You will often see any tabby longhair kitten sold as a Maine Coon, or a seal point kitten sold as a Siamese, without any pedigree or health testing.
Reinforcing and educating around the fact that having a pedigree = breed, and no pedigree = no breed, is a first step into fighting backyard breeders and toward ethical breeding.
To conclude, if your cat doesn’t have a pedigree, you can’t know its breed, and it’s extremely likely that it is a domestic cat that bred with other domestic cats without human intervention, as cats developed differently from dogs. However, this doesn’t mean anything about the worth of your cat, and you should be proud of it, no matter its origins!
Sources
Lipinski MJ, Froenicke L, Baysac KC, Billings NC, Leutenegger CM, Levy AM, Longeri M, Niini T, Ozpinar H, Slater MR, Pedersen NC, Lyons LA. The ascent of cat breeds: genetic evaluations of breeds and worldwide random-bred populations. Genomics. 2008 Jan;91(1):12-21. doi: 10.1016/j.ygeno.2007.10.009. Epub 2007 Dec 3. PMID: 18060738; PMCID: PMC2267438.
Montague MJ, Li G, Gandolfi B, et al. Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014;111(48):17230-17235. doi:10.1073/pnas.1410083111
Driscoll CA, Macdonald DW, O'Brien SJ. From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009;106 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):9971-9978. doi:10.1073/pnas.0901586106