The reason why the Maine Coon tail is long and flowing

You might ask a wider question rather than just looking at the beautiful Maine Coon cat and ask whether all small cats have similar tails. The answer is that they don't. And I'm talking about the wild cat species as well as the cat breeds and the moggies.

I think this is 'Oscar' an Australia Maine Coon and what a tail. Perfect. Image assessed as being in the public domain on social media. 

There is a variation among wild cat species in tail length which is due to evolutionary pressures such that, for example, the snow leopard has a beautifully long rope-like tail to aid balance while it chases prey (blue sheep) on 40° escarpments high up in the Himalayas while the American bobcat has a very short tail as has the lynx because they don't want their tails to drag in the snow! That's the suggested reason and the underlying reason is always evolutionary pressures in order to boost survival.

The typical domestic cat has a standard looking tail of medium length but the Maine Coon cat has perhaps the most impressive tail of all domestic cats and it is described by the Cat Fanciers' Association as being "long, wide at the base, and tapering. Fur long and flowing". The reason for this desire to create this type of tail is because it is (1) attractive and (2) in keeping with the rest of the cat's appearance.

Look at my tail! Beautiful. Image: Instagram.

That's what the tail should look like and nearly all the time it does look like that. Whereas the wild cats evolved their tails through natural selection (evolutionary pressures as I have described it) all the cat breeds are not subject to evolutionary pressures but to artificial selection in which the breeder moulds and manipulates the appearance of their cats through selecting foundation cats of a certain type and mating them in a controlled way to ensure that the finished product is as close a match as possible to the breed standard as set down by the cat association with whom they are affiliated.

This is an important point to make because the domestic cat is one species of cat and within that species there are around 70 active breeds and they've all been created through artificial selection whereas the random bred cat - as its description indicates - is subject to evolutionary pressures and natural selection.