How many hair strands on a Maine Coon cat?

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A lot is the answer!! When you try and work out the answer to the question in the title there has to be some estimates and a little bit of judicious guesswork but I think I can be reasonably accurate. If you disagree, please tell me. I'd welcome some input on this and would consider amending the page if necessary.

Around 14 million!

A large Maine Coon is about 2x the size of a random bred cat looking at the many pictures of videos on the internet. That should mean twice the surface area (very approximately).

On an earlier calculation that I made for a standard moggie I said that there are 2,500 hair strands per square centimetre. The surface area of the standard cat is around 2,730 square centimetres. This makes 6.825 million hair strands. You might round that up to 7 million hair strands.

As the Maine has about twice the surface area of a standard moggie the total number of hairs on a Maine Coon cat would be approximately 14 million.

Note: In a previous earlier calculation I said that there was an agreement on the internet that there were 25,000 hairs strands per square centimeter. I think that number is very high. Far higher than it is. I have reduced that 25,000 hair strands figure to 2,500 per square centimeter based on there being 50 hair strands in one centimeter. If that is correct, the total number of hair strands in a square centimeter would be 50 times 50 which is 2,500.

I decided on this by checking out my cat! Hard. Impossible to really check the number of hairs per centimeter but it is not about 157 hairs which is would have to be for there to be 25,000 per square centimeter.

I may well revise this page a few more times in the months and years to come if I am still alive! 😎😉.

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