Huge Maine Coon

This is a huge and handsome Maine Coon. His name is Gizmo. He wins lots of prizes at cat show which is predictable as he is so special. His size is slightly unreal. When he behaves like a cat and swats the cat tease held by the judge, Jean-Marc Lagarde from France, it seems out of place. Is he really a domestic cat or a creature from another planet?!

I am told that for 2013, Gizmo was The International Cat Association’s number one cat of the East Coast, USA. He was also awarded 9th place for International Cat and the second best Maine Coon in the world. Who is number one! How can a Maine Coon be better than Gizmo?

His stunning coat is described as “black ticked tabby an white”. His coat looks like shading or smoke but I have that incorrect apparently. The glorious effect, when the the coat is parted, is due to the fact that only part of each hair strand is pigmented by eumelanin, while the other part unpigmented. The pigmented part occupying about one-third to two-thirds of each hair fibre is at the top of the hair strand.

Size is such an important feature of the domestic cat, perhaps particularly so, in the United States where to Europeans everything is oversized from cars to fridges. As the Maine Coon is the world’s largest domestic cat (excluding wild hybrids) it is also unsurprising that this breed is probably the most popular or at least in the top 3.

There are two other notably huge Maine Coons on PoC:

And the other is Shooter:

There are many other super-large Maine Coons which are not in the public eye. On the largest domestic cat breed page of PoC I set out the weights of all the cat breeds and mention that, usually, the upper weight of the Maine Coon is around 25 pounds. A visitor complained bitterly (see quoted extract below) at that figure as his Maine Coon (all muscle) was 32 pounds. I conclude that, exceptionally, this cat breed can weigh more than 30 pounds which is somewhere near three times the average and the same weight as an F1 Savannah cat.

His head was the size of both my fists put together, stood about 14 inches at his front shoulders, weighed 32 lbs. in his prime and not an ounce of fat on him. Even with his size, he had the style, grace and SPEED that other cats would have to envy. Mr. Fee passed away at 18 years old and will forever be sorely and lovingly missed.

The exceptional weight of this cat breed must partly be put down to selective breeding. Perhaps it is all down to selective breeding. In other words breeders have created this enormous size. The original Maine Coons were long haired moggies from England. They certainly were not exceptional in size unless sailors selected large cats for ship’s cats.

Why does size play such an important role in popularity? Google does not provide the answer. It must be to do with survival, ultimately. It has to be. Large size equates to a greater chance of survival and therefore we are impressed by size. We admire big animals.