We are talking about the Ragdoll cat. People want to know where it comes from. The majority of cat breeds have been ‘Made in America’ and the story is no different for this popular cat breed. The Ragdoll comes from California. It was the time when quite a large number of cat breeds were created: the middle of the 20th century. The 1960s to be exact.
The person who created the breed is Ann Baker. She had a particular personality and by all accounts was difficult to deal with. She created a franchise system which is the first and last of its kind with respect to the breeding of a domestic cat.
I don’t want to digress from the question in the title but if you want to you can read about this breed in detail by clicking on this link.
The story of this cat’s origin doesn’t quite end there. The breed was created and developed by Ann Baker by mating the special kittens from a Persian-type cat whose name was Josephine with a Birman type cat whose name was Daddy Warbucks.
Both these cats were not purebreds and therefore they were random bred cats. But they had a type making them similar to a Persian and a Birman. You could therefore go further back to the origin of these two cats if you wanted to look at the full back story to the origins of the Ragdoll.
The Persian originally, it is thought, comes from Iran (formerly Persia) while the Birman originally comes from Burma (now Myanmar).
Apparently, Josephine looked like an Angora cat. The true Turkish Angoras are similar in appearance to the original looking Persian. She was almost feral. Daddy Warbucks looked like a Birman with white socks, white chin and a white tip on his tail.
The RagaMuffin is a breed which split off from the Ragdoll as the breeders were disenchanted with Ann Baker. These breeds are closely linked.
The Ragdoll is a good example of random bred cats being selectively bred to create a new cat breed.
