Quote:
Originally Posted by MonBon
I mean, domestic short hair is basically the equivalent of saying your cat is a mutt with too few defining characteristics to determine its breed.
Cats haven't been bred to have high contrast between breeds so they're all more similar when compared to doggos.
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You're right that cats have less genetic diversity than dogs, which is why all breeds of cat are roughly the same size (as opposed to dogs where you have Pomeranians and German Shepherds).
However, saying that "domestic short hair" means the cat is a mutt isn't exactly accurate. The point I'm trying to make is that "domestic" breed cats ARE genealogically a single breed, even if they aren't a pedigreed pure breed. They don't have breed standards set by a central authority that decides "even if it's purebred, it doesn't count as that breed unless it has exactly this, this, and this" but they breed true -- two domestic cat parents will have domestic cat kittens, and mixing a domestic cat parent with, say, a Siamese cat parent will result in a kitten with a mix of the parents' traits. And no matter how you try to mix purebred non-domestic-cat parents, the offspring will never come out as a domestic cat; it will come out as a hybrid of the parents.
(The exceptions, of course, are the purebred cat breeds that were derived from the domestic cat. They're close enough that if you pair two such breeds together, the offspring might not really be distinguishable from other domestic cats, because at that point the second parent is putting in the genes that had been bred out from the first. But you're never going to get a moggie from breeding a Siamese with a Persian.)
That's not to say that domestic cats AREN'T often mutts. My cats most certainly have some Maine Coon ancestry. They're both larger than average, they both have the characteristic ruff (though it's harder to tell on the shorthair), they both have the characteristic facial markings, one of them has long fur... They're not purebred by any stretch, but it hasn't been enough generations for the Maine Coon influence to have faded completely.