Cat History or the evolution of the wild cats all the way through to the first domestic cats, followed by the development of the cat fancy and consequently the creation of numerous domestic cat breeds is all set out below in the form of a continuous time line.
The intention is to get a feel for “whole picture” and how the modern domestic cat fits into world history.
The dates are in years. For example, “40 million” means 40 million years ago. The more modern era is marked by an actual date.
This website if still growing. Although there are a lot of links to cats referred to on this page, there will be more links in time. The dates for the modern domestic cat breeds refer to the date the cat was created or “discovered”. “Discovered” in this context means by someone in the West, usually a cat breeder discovering a de facto new breed in another country.
Links on the cat breed takes you to a full description and to the best pictures. Links on the dates and area of origin take you to notes on this page as, for example, the date may be disputed.
I have included links to posts about things associated with cats and cat breeds, such as cat shows as this helps to put the history of the cat breeds in context. These are in italics to separate them out from the date or origin of the cat breeds.
Cat history — Important note: cat history is often hazy so these dates, although often accurate, may on occasions be estimates.
Cat History -This Chart shows the “productive” years in the cat fancy
-the 1950s and 60s and then the 1980s.
How many cat breeds are there?
Cat History – The Future
Cat history wouldn’t be complete without some predictions. So, I can’t resist, on this occasion, making a fool of myself and speculating what the future might bring. These are my views only and pure speculation. We can see in the graph above the “explosion” in the creation of cat breeds during the 20th century.
The breeds listed are not all the cat breeds as there are many experimental breeds or proposals for breeds, which you can see on this page: Domestic cat breeds (this is a spill over list).
The number of cat breeds has possibly reached near saturation point and perhaps even overshot the mark (i.e. too many as some could be merged some people would argue).
The three areas where change are likely to occur for cats are (a) feral cat populations – upwards (b) wild cat populations – downwards (c) cat association rationalization – merger (d) introduction of regulations to encourage responsible cat ownership. And I am talking mainly here of the USA as I must do because it is the biggest “market” by far for the domestic cat but I am not being critical of it in any way. Nothing approaches it and it is the most developed domestic cat market it seems to me. USA wide ban on declawing is also possible and indeed probable.
Many cats in the poorer countries will live poor lives for many years to come and it is almost impossible to do much about that because of inefficient and sometimes, regrettably, corrupt governments.
I have put some proposed dates into the time line below with respect to the above changes.
Comments are closed.