Maine Coon plays with a standard moggy through a glass door

This is a screenshot from a video which explains the poor image quality but nonetheless it is a good image because it starkly demonstrates the size difference in a large Maine Coon (not all of them can be described as very large) and a standard black-and-white random-bred cat. 

As usual, this sort of image catches my eye because it is worth a lot of words. Might it be fair to say that the major reason why Maine Coons are currently enjoying a surge in popularity is because people want to live with a big domestic cat? People like size. They like small or they like big and the biggest domestic cat breeder the Maine Coon. The smallest domestic cat breed, by the way, is the Singapura. However, the Singapura is not as extremely small as the Maine Coon can be extremely big. I hope you understand what I mean by that.

Maine Coon plays with a standard moggy through a glass door. Screenshot.

There are some misconceptions about the Maine Coon, however, when it comes to size. You take a standard-sized female Maine Coon who has not been selectively bred to be particularly big and they won't be that much bigger than a standard-sized moggy. But when they are big, they are enormous, the size of a Canadian lynx or that is what it looks like.

It is useful, at this juncture, to look at the breed standard for the Maine Coon. We associate Maine Coons with large size but the general standard for the Maine Coon does not mention that this cat should be particularly large except to say that "quality should never be sacrificed for size". 

Under the "body shape" section it says that this cat should be muscular and broad chested. The body should be long with all parts in proportion. Once again, it does not specify that Maine Coons should be enormous! 

It is the cat breeders who have jumped on this bandwagon to make them bigger. It's probably social media which kick this off as videos and photographs of very large Maine Coons attracted a lot of views. This implies that people like them which encourages breeders to breed them big.