The question is interesting because it is loosely formulated. What it is asking is can the domestic cat mate with a bobcat to create hybrid offspring and the best answer comes from Sarah Hartwell when she writes about “domestic hybrid with bobcat and lynx”. I will quote her verbatim because the answer demands a bit of precision and she is a very precise lady,
“The bobcat (F. Rufus) will mate with domestic cats and there are several breeds that have claimed to be descended from such mating; none have stood the scrutiny of genetic testing.”
What she’s saying is that these two species of cat may mate i.e. they may engage in the sex act but they don’t produce any offspring or in the words of Sarah Hartwell “they do not seem to be interfertile”. The word “interfertile” means capable of interbreeding. So, bobcats might have sex with the occasional domestic cat but there are no babies. That’s the answer.
There are stories of bobcats mating with domestic cat but once again in the words of Sarah Hartwell, “No modern alleged bobcat-domestic hybrid has been proven by DNA testing.
The Pixie-Bob and lynx purebred cats have both been proven to be 100% domestic cats. They have no bobcat or lynx DNA in them. You will see videos and articles online about bobcat hybrids and there are claims that their cats have been submitted for DNA testing to UC Davis or other universities where bobcat genes have been confirmed. However, when enquiries have been made with these universities, they’ve apparently responded that no bobcat markers were found in these alleged hybrids.
There have been some quite convincing stories about the successful mating of bobcats with domestic cats but they’ve not stood up to scrutiny it seems to me. There was an account of a bobcat hybrid in CATS Magazine, in April 1960 titled “Stubby, The Part Bobcat” by N. P. Kenoyer of Cupertino, California.
Here is an extract (my thanks to messybeast.com):
“It was early evening when we heard the unmistakable howl of Tabbette, our dark, striped cat. We rushed outside to see what neighbor’s tomcat was courting our pet. We stopped short when we saw the two animals. It was not a neighbor’s tom. The two cats faced each other, snarling and howling. Tabbette hugged the ground, her ears laid back tight against her head and her lips pressed against her teeth. This attitude was not unusual for her during this period, but her new, determined, prospective mate was. He was a young Bobcat, long-legged, slim-bodied with a mixture of stripes and spots running down his legs…..Two months later Tabbette had five dark, tabby, stubby-tailed kittens. Some were tinged with reddish fur running along the soft undersides of their bellies. The tails were of different lengths but all bobbed….We kept a male kitten which we named Stubby.”
In truth the offspring were not bobcat hybrids but bobtailed domestic cats. They look like classic (blotched tabbies). Both parents would have to be classic tabby domestic cats as the gene creating the coat is recessive.
Stubby the alleged male bobcat-domestic cat hybrid is shown at the top of the page. It seems that N. P. Kenoyer had mistaken a bobtailed domestic cat for a bobcat.
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