Are Maine Coons quiet 'gentle giants?'

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The Maine Coon is often described as a 'gentle giant'. And sometimes you see the breed described as 'quiet'. For example, the Daily Paws website says that "These big cats are surprisingly quiet—they do love to communicate and vocalize to their humans, but their soft voice may take you by surprise."

This Maine Coon illustrates the CFA page on the breed:


He/she looks pretty normal, doesn't he? Not gigantic. No extreme muzzle or super-sized ears with massive lynx tips sprouting from them. This is the norm for Maine Coons.

Quiet?

But one Maine Coon owner on Twitter says that her cat is noisy. She says:
As a Maine Coon owner I disagree with this post. I mostly put focus on the breed of my cat to warn others though. They are - noisy! And big and fluffy, which is how he survives my wrath, which I obtain by him being noisy!
Who are we to believe? Neither provides us with the right or complete information as there will be variations between individual cats. They probably tend to be on the quiet side with voices that don't really match up to their size.

That is probably the point. Some might expect Maine Coons to have loud voices as they are big cats but this is a misplaced expectation. I have a feeling that the quiet voice description is as much to do with expectation management as it is to actually having quiet voices. Give a standard moggie the Maine Coon voice and it'll sound normal or within the range of normality.

I often refer to the author, show judge and former breeder (?), Gloria Stephens who says that the breed has a 'tiny voice'. And 'for big cats they are fairly quiet' (Legacy of the Cat). She should have a better overview of the breed than most having met a large number of individual cats and good ones.

The lady who is complaining on Twitter that her Maine Coon is too noisy for her may be provoking her cat into being noisy because of what she is doing. Perhaps she is ignoring him and he is demanding attention for that reason. I don't know but a cat's behavior including the volume and style of their vocalisations is somewhat dependant on their caregiver's behavior towards them. And there'll be a downward spiral here. If she is annoyed, she might ignore her cat which may encourage more attention seeking behavior which in turn may annoy her even more and so on.

Or it is possible that her cat is vocalising anxiety. That would make them more noisy.

Giants?

As for being 'gentle giants' this is another interesting topic. The ones we see on social media can be enormous and definitely 'giants' of the domestic cat world. They can weight 20-25 pounds when the average domestic cat weighs around 10 pounds.


But - and I have said this before - the Maine Coon does not HAVE to be super-large. There is nothing in the breed standard (cat association guidelines) which says that the breed has to be large. They just have to be 'solid' and 'rugged' and 'well proportioned'. Nothing large in those words.

The breeders have been chasing fame and fortune by creating ever more impressive cats in terms of size.

So, the official response on whether the Maine Coon needs to be a giant is, No. The show cat champions are larger than normal cats but not giants. The giants are on social media and they are exceptionally rare.

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