What are Maine Coon ear furnishings?

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It sounds as if interior decoration is being discussed. 'Furnishings' normally means the furniture, fittings, and other decorative accessories such as curtains and carpets, for a house or room. 

But in the great family of cat fanciers, it means ear hair 😊 and Maine Coons have lots of it. Sticking out of the top of the ear (lynx tips) or sprouting from inside the ear and fanning out like water sprinklers on a football pitch.

Cat fanciers love it. I like it too but I find it strange because for humans it is the opposite. Men ask their barber to shave the inside of the ear to remove their ear hair. Well, the barber asks first and the client always says 'yes'. After all ear hair is unattractive 😎. So why is it attractive when it is on domestic cats?

Maine Coon ear furnishings
Maine Coon ear furnishings. Image by MikeB

Well, I can think of one reason but there might be others. Cats are covered in fur, millions of hair strands. How many hair strands are there on a domestic cat? I tried to count them once 😒. Not one by one but a rough calculation. Click on the link below to see what I came up with if it interests you.


I made is 68,250,000 (68.25 million)!

I digress. But because cats are hairy and furry it is expected that they'll have hairs coming out of their ears. It is part of their general appearance and what makes them attractive. Fur generally is attractive to humans which accounts for the millions of wild cats 'harvested' (horrible word) for their pelts over decades. So sad for me.

In contrast humans are essential nude. Humans lost most of their fur through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Hairlessness evolved through natural selection to remove the potential for blood-sucking lice, fleas and ticks and the diseases they spread to reside on humans in their 'fur. These are ectoparasites and cats are plagued by them particularly fleas as we all know.

Except for the top of the head humans generally don't like hairs on their bodies. That attitude is a form of evolution as well in following the physical changes.

People, particularly woman do a lot of hair removal which proves the point.

Longhaired cats are popular but rare in feral cat colonies as it is a recessive gene that creates longhair. It is in the cat breeds where we see longhaired cats not in feral colonies. This is due to artificial selection aka selective breeding which results in the recessive gene coming out of hiding and its effect noticed in phenotype.

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