What affects us affects cats
People are interested in domestic cat hybrids because they look different. This cat is basically a Maine Coon with curled back ears and some vague pointing on the coat. But when you look at the cat, he/she looks like a strange Maine Coon. The dominant feature is the huge Maine Coon muzzle and then …
The best source for information of this kind is Sarah Hartwell’s messybeast.com. She is quite clear on this. While lions, jaguars and leopards can all mate with each other to ‘form viable hybrids’, the tiger can only successfully mate to produce viable offspring with the lion. When a tiger mates with the leopard the …
Yes, domestic cats can and do mate (breed) with wildcats. There is a slight complication in answering the question to do with definitions. The word ‘wildcat’ means the species of wild cat called ‘wildcats’! They are one species of small wild cat divided into four subspecies. They are the ancestor of the domestic cat …
Hybrid cats can be divided into three categories, entirely domestic cat hybrids (domestic cat x domestic cat), wild cat hybrids (wild cat x wild cat) and wild cat/domestic cat hybrids (wild cat x domestic cat): Definition of “Hybrid” Species versus Breed Hybrid Vigor Entirely Domestic Cat Hybrids Entirely Wild Cat Hybrids Wild Cat/Domestic Cat …
Ligers are real but unnatural. The liger is a hybrid from a mating between a female tiger and a male lion. The lion and tiger don’t meet in the wild. They only have the opportunity to mate when they are brought together by somebody. And the kind of people who bring them together are …
Recent research tells us two things about the Chinese mountain cat aka Chinese desert cat: they are hybridized and they were not involved in the cat domestication process. Hybridization Hybridization is sometimes referred to as ‘genetic admixture’. Over many years the Chinese mountain cat has mated with both domestic and feral cats and other …
This is a photograph of a cat which is the result of a mating between a serval and a caracal. They are called Caravals, as I understand it. This is a young cat but the coat is very distinctly different to both the caracal and the serval and as expected it is somewhere in …
We know that the Scottish wildcat is either extinct in the wild in Scotland or very nearly so because of long-term hybridisation with domestic and feral cats. These two species i.e. the wildcat and the domestic cat readily mate. It is the wildcat’s undoing in Europe and in Africa. And today, we are told …
