How many cat breeds are there? 104, at least, is the answer and you can see them in this is very functional but, I hope useful, video. There is no sound and the pictures arrive and move on quickly but you can pause the video. The video has to move fast because of the large number of cat breed pictures featured. Videos need to be fairly short to keep the file size of the video manageable, a technical problem.
A lot of people don’t realize there are 104 cat breeds. Actually there are probably more. There lies a difficulty. How do you decide what a cat breed is?
You could say – and I have included one or two under this criteria in the video – that feral or stray cats living exclusively within a confined area which are allowed to breed are as purebred as any registered purebred cat. They will probably be purer, in fact.
There are in the order of about 50-70 mainstream cat breeds so the other half in this video are quite rare. Even some of the mainstream ones are fairly rare.
A classic case concerning the difficulty in discussing the cat breeds is the Turkish Angora. This is a well known and popular cat breed. In the USA and Europe it is a purebred cat with a pedigree. It is therefore registered with a cat association.
In Turkey, the place where the Turkish Angora comes from, it is not a registered cat breed. It is a moggie. And it looks very different. In looks more like a real Turkish Angora.
You would have to classify the Turkish Angora in Turkey as a cat breed despite looking different and having no recorded pedigree with a cat association. This gives us the clue as to the tricky nature of showing off cat breed pictures in a video.
As it happens I made an earlier video of 77 cat breeds, the mainstream ones but, ironically, forgot to add one of my favorites, the Savannah cat.
The video below is much better known but probably less good:
There you have it. Now I will make a video about the 36 wild cat species. Are there 36 wild cat species? That is another tricky question. And finally, visitors should know that all the cat breeds and all the moggies and feral cats are one cat species: Felis silvestris catus.
Michael, many thanks for mentioning real Angora cats in this article! Our longhair random bred Anatolian cats are certainly Angoras (genetically), they don’t have a really homogenous look like fancy cats, but still they are similar when we compare cats from different cities of Turkey. ”A purebred” fancy cat could be easily created from our Angora cats, probably similar in look like furry Ankara Zoo cats and bred according to standard what represents Angora cats best.
104 cat breeds – that’s a lot of them! How many cat breeds are really natural, having geographic origins (I hope ”Persian” cat does not count)?
Hi, nice to hear from you guys. How many breeds are natural? Good question. The trouble in answering that question is that all cat breeds that are registered with the major cat associations are no long natural because they have been selectively breed for ages. There are some cat breeds that were natural and there are some that are still natural. The ones that are still natural are like the real Turkish Angora in Turkey. There are probably some Siamese cats in Thailand. I don’t know. And there are some Kuriilan Bobtails on the Kuril Islands off Russia. These are just examples. The best example is the Turkish Angora in Turkey.
The trouble with cat breeds is that they are very complicated because people got involved and bred the cats under unnatural rules.
Oops, really long. Sorry. I misplaced my domestic cat file. Get back to you on that. Great vids.
Yes, there are 36 wildcat species currently. There are a few that are dying off in zoos and personal collects somewhere, but they are, sadly, doomed.
I have a word file I made of all the current domestic breeds I could find and I see several you have that I don’t recall having. I’ll double check when the world slows down and let you know the few I have that you don’t. I do have some breeds that are ‘in the works’ so too speak, so I don’t really count those. Here is a list of the wildcats currently alive on earth last check:
African Golden Cat
African Lion
African Wild Cat
Amur Leopard
Andean Mountain Cat
Asian Golden Cat
Asian Wild Cat
Asiatic Cheetah
Asiatic Lion
Bengal Tiger
Black Footed Cat
Black Lion
Bobcat
Bornean Bay Cat
Canadian Lynx
Caracal
Cheetah
Chinese Mountain Cat
Clouded Leopard
Cougar
Eurasian Lynx
European Wild Cat
Fishing Cat
Flat Headed Cat
Geoffroy’s Cat
Golden Tabby Tiger
Iberian Lynx
Indochinese Tiger
Iriomote Cat
Jaguar
Jaguarundi
Javan Tiger
Jungle Cat
King Cheetah
Kodkod
Leopard
Leopard Cat
Lynx
Malayan Tiger
Marbled Cat
Margay
Ocelot
Oncilla
Pallas Cat
Pampas Cat
Panther Atrox
Persian Leopard
Rusty Spotted Cat
Sand Cat
Scottish Wild Cat
Serval
Siberian Tiger
Snow Leopard
South China Tiger
Sumatran Tiger
Sunda Clouded Leopard
Tiger
Tiger Cat
White Lion
Thanks for taking the time Dan that is nice of you.
Glad to do it.