Maine Coon is not a 'natural breed'

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The experts including cat show judges sometimes refer to the Maine Coon as a 'natural breed' but this descriptive phrase is an oxymoron as all cat breeds are unnatural as they are the products of artificial selection which is the opposite to the method by which new species are created: natural selection.

In case you don't know the word, an oxymoron is a phrase in which the words conflict. In this instance the word 'natural' conflicts with the word 'breed'. There is nothing natural about cat breeding. It is all very contrived and unnatural. It is quite brutal in many ways; keeping studs in cages all their miserable lives and procreating from time to time and doing nothing else. And the females forever pregnant. All organised and managed by a person.

All Maine Coons originate from moggie barn cats in Maine and the east coast of the US. The forerunner of the Maine Coon were not breeds. They were your standard random-bred cats imported from England with the European settlers. That's the most likely explanation of their origin.

These imported cats must have been moggies as there was no cat fancy anywhere until the late 1800s. The Maine Coon (MC) was created out of these barn cats through selective breeding aka artificial selection.

So, the forerunners of today's MC were non-purebred and natural while after the intervention of the cat fancy we have the unnatural MC. And it is very typical for cat breeds to be created by artificial selection from moggies. What the show judge means is that the ancestor was a barn cat and moggie barn cats are natural but this does not make the MC natural.

That's all I have to say on the matter. I thought about it when I saw the video of a colorful cat show judge talking about the MC. A screenshot is above. He's good and he points out the main appearance characteristics but he is technically wrong about it being a natural breed.

What the judge in the photo meant was that the forerunners were moggies but that is a different thing. Also, many other breeds were created from moggies such as the Norwegian Forest Cat, the Siberian, the Manx, the Scottish Fold and so on.

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