The words of the title are very direct but they need to be qualified and discussed because what I am going to say is not quite as straightforward as the title implies. 🤔 The situation about there being a breed bigger than the Maine Coon cat has been in place for some time now.
Despite that, the Internet consistently states that the Maine Coon cat is the biggest breed of domestic cat. That’s not quite accurate these days. Although there is a difference between the size of the average Maine Coon cat and the enormous, celebrity Maine Coon cats often bred in Russia or Eastern European breeders. These are giant domestic cats and unassailable in terms of being the biggest.
About 15 years ago the Maine Coon cat was the largest domestic cat breed and I said so because at that time, the Savannah cat was not accepted by the cat associations particularly the Cat Fanciers’ Association (CFA) and The International Cat Association (TICA). Of those two, the latter is more open to accepting new breeds and indeed far more breeds are registered with TICA than with the CFA.
But now the Savannah cat is accepted by TICA but not by the way by the CFA, which means the Savannah cat is a mainstream cat breed nowadays.
But within the Savannah cat family, there are different sizes from the largest being the first filial (F1) and the smallest being the 5th to 7th filial (F5-F7). The latter are no bigger than ordinary domestic random-bred cats. I want to talk about the F1 Savannah cat because it is that particular cat which is bigger than the Maine Coon cat on average.
Whereas there is a scaling of size within the Savannah cat breed, the same cannot be said in quite the same way about the Maine Coon cat. Although there are different sizes of Maine Coon cat as mentioned, you don’t buy a F1-F7 Maine Coon cat. Those categories only apply to wildcat hybrids.
The first filial Savannah cat is half serval (a medium-sized wild cat) whereas the F7 is seven generations from the wild and therefore there is only a small amount of serval genes within that cat.
And so the F1 is half a wild cat if you like whereas the F7 is very much a domestic cat.
Going back to around 2010 the Guinness World Record tallest domestic cat to the shoulder was a female F1 Savannah cat called Scarlet’s Magic a.k.a. Magic. I made a video of her with the son of Martin and Katherine Stucki (see above).
RELATED: F1 Savannah cat ‘Magic’ – indeed, a magical cat
It was highly successful and one of the top videos on YouTube at that time and it achieved around 11 million views. That doesn’t seem like an awful lot nowadays because social media platforms like TikTok present videos in an entirely different way. They auto-play which means you double or treble the number of viewings and the total number is misleading in my view.
The current largest domestic cat is an F2 Savannah cat according to Guinness World Records. The second filial Savannah cat can be as large as the first filial sometimes. The F2 and F1 Savannah cats can be very good domestic cat but they are more demanding than your typical domestic cat and require much more input from their caregiver.
They are very special and very expensive and the best way to live with a F1 Savannah cat is to leave the train them and take them for walks like a dog. That way you will meet a lot of people who will gaze upon your cat in astonishment and rightly so because they are immensely impressive.
The video above is of F1 Savannah cat Titan on a shopping trip with his owner. He caused a bit of a stir in the shop as you can imagine and it was one of those large, typically American, outlets in the land of the free!
P.S. The mansion I refer to is Marland Mansion, a 43,561 square feet (4,046.9 m2) Mediterranean Revival-style mansion located in Ponca City, Oklahoma, United States. Built by oil baron and philanthropist Ernest Whitworth (E.W.)
The link to the vide below is worth clicking as the video will impress you if you have not seen it before.
RELATED: F1 Savannah cat jumps to top bunk to wake sleeping boy
