A Michael Broad Blog
It depends how far back into history you want to go. The important point is that the Maine Coon, or any other domestic cat in the North America, did not evolve from a small wild cat species in North America. Therefore, all domestic cats in the USA are imported, non-native animals which irritates cat …
The only reason why domestic cats are selectively bred is to make attractive cats which sell at the maximum price and which win cat shows because they meet the guidelines of the breed standard. That pretty much sums it up in a single sentence. Selective breeding is essentially inbreeding to fix the genes of …
Domestic cats are already adapting to modern human living but what about the long term future, the 22nd and 23rd centuries? Cats are more sociable than they were when first domesticated some 9,500 to perhaps even 14,500 years ago. However, they are a cat’s whisker away from their wild cat ancestor in terms of …
‘Punch face’ is an unfortunate term to describe the modern Persian cat. The term is based on violence which makes it innapropriate. This is a punch face cat: Below is an alternative image. The Persian cat in the image below is more a flat-faced Persian while the one above has some doll face characteristics: …
Yes, Ocicat is a word. It is a made-up word; a combination of ‘ocelot’ and ‘cat’. The word should be captilised as it is the breed name of the cat. The Ocicat is an American breed of spotted tabby cat. It was created through selective breeding to satisfy the demand for a domestic cat …
It is instructional to remind ourselves what a badly bred purebred cat looks like. Here we have an Exotic Shorthair, the shorthaired version of the Persian. The facial anatomy has been distorted by poor selective breeding. The eyes bulge and appear to point in different directions. It is almost as if the eyes are …
These Maine Coons with human faces keep resurfacing on the internet. I reported on them quite a while ago and here they are again being publicised by the Daily Mail. They are the creation of Tatyana Rastorgueva, 44, from Moscow who has been breeding Maine Coons for 15 years. They are the result of …
The Oriental SH is known for slenderness and long legs and, yes, large ears but this strange looking individual has really odd ears. The breeders have altered the anatomy of this cat to the point where the the animal looks unlike a cat as we know it. I know breeders want to take selective …
