Is the Maine Coon the biggest cat? No.

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NO, the Maine Coon is not the biggest cat. That accolade goes to the Siberian tiger. The Maine Coon is the biggest domestic cat breed. That is a very specific statement. To say it another way, Maine Coon cats, in general, are the largest of all the purebred cats among the approximate hundred different cat breeds. So, I am not including the random read cats i.e. non-purebred cats in that statement.

Is the Maine Coon the biggest cat? No.
 Is the Maine Coon the biggest cat? No. Image in public domain.

You will get some individual non-purebred cats who are bigger than large Maine Coons but that, in a way, is not the point because this is about that general "race" of cats called the Maine Coons. They are very special in that they are bred through selective breeding to be as large as possible. In order to achieve this the breeders select foundation cats which are large and they let them mate. And then the offspring mate with the parents and in this way, you magnify the largeness of the breed in that breeding line.

Some Maine Coons are quite small relative to the overall size of the breed. In fact, some Maine Coons are no bigger than a standard moggy. People should not forget that. It is easy to do so because, quite naturally, people like large Maine Coons and they go in search of them on the Internet. In doing this they learn to believe that Maine Coons are all enormous which they are not.

To recap, if the question in the title was: 'Is the Maine Coon the largest cat breed' the answer would be yes. However, the question in the title is unspecific and therefore you have to compare the Maine Coon with all the different species of cat of which there are about 37. Within that group of 37 species is the domestic cat. Within the domestic cat as a distinct species there are random bred cats and purebred cats. The former massively outnumber the latter. And within the category of purebred cats there are Maine Coons. And within that category of Maine Coons there are some individual cats who are very large indeed and they make this breed the largest.

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