How to tell a Maine Coon from a tabby!?

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The question is the title to an article on the Maine Coon Central website. The No. 1 Maine Coon cat website, they claim. The question is also the title to this article. The problem is that the question doesn't make sense! 😁 That's because "Maine Coon" is the name of a cat breed while "tabby" is the name of a coat type and pattern.

How to tell a Maine Coon from a tabby!? The question is daft; meaningless. Image: MikeB
How to tell a Maine Coon from a tabby!? The question is daft; meaningless. Image: MikeB

Many Maine Coon cats have tabby coats. So the question in the title is not comparing apples with apples or pears with pears. It's comparing two entirely different things which actually overlap in any case. The question shouldn't be asked.

Perhaps the question is meant to ask this question: what's the difference between a tabby Maine Coon cat and a tabby non-purebred cat?

The answer that question is that the Maine Coon cat is a very distinct and distinguished looking cat very often quite different to a medium-longhaired non-purebred cat.

That said, you see lots of Maine Coon-mix cats on the Internet which are in fact brown or grey tabby cats. This blurs the boundaries between a genuine purebred Maine Coon cat and a Maine Coon mix, or a non-purebred cat which looks a bit like a Maine Coon.

You get this blurring of boundaries sometimes but the genuine Maine Coon cat with that square and strong muzzle, tall triangular ears sitting very erect with lynx tips, beautiful plumed tail and super-long body with a shaggy coat of various types, is normally easy to distinguish from a tabby moggy.

The difference is not in the coat but in the body conformation and all the anatomical aspects of the Maine Coon cat that I have mentioned above. Of them all the best identifiers of the Maine Coon is the square and strong muzzle and large, lynx tipped ears.

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Please excuse the occasional typo due to preparing these articles at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I don't have a proof reader.

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