It is estimated that there are 600 million cats in the world, less than 10% of which belong to a specific breed. Few, but enough to raise a question: are these races all our “fault”, or are there some that developed naturally? The answer is more complex than expected, and those who deal with felines have been working on it for more than ten years.
selected or spontaneous? The world’s leading expert on the subject is Leslie Lyons, feline geneticist from the University of Missouri, who with her studies has demonstrated first of all that most of the cat breeds we have today have artificial origins, and are the result of human selection over the last 140 years.
Most, but not all: there are some breeds that can be considered “natural”, whose characteristics have evolved as a result of environmental pressures and not human selection.
Environmental pressures. Some of these breeds that we could define as “ancient” are the Maine Coon, the Siberian cat, the Russian blue and the Norwegian forest cat (all breeds adapted to the cold), but also the Turkish Van, originally from the Turkish lake of the same name, and the Egyptian Mau, both breeds that evolved in warm climates.
However, these differences do not change the origins of these ancient breeds, which all evolved in response to environmental pressures: for example, the Siberian has thick fur and large bones because that was needed in the Russian forests where the breed emerged. The Abyssinian, on the other hand, another naturally evolved breed, is thinner, has short hair and has big ears, because it was born on the coasts of the Indian Ocean.
Even the natural becomes artificial. Then there are natural breeds that were born following simple geographical isolation: the most famous is the Isle of Man cat, which following a mutation lost its tail, of which only a stump remains. A distinctive characteristic that arose following isolation and inbreeding, and which also has contraindications: one above all, the risk for these cats to develop defects in the spine.
More and more modified. However, it must be said that even the most natural breeds have been modified in some way in the last century and a half: the Russian blues, for example, were crossed with the Siamese to avoid their disappearance after the Second World War. There are few that have remained intact or almost intact: Siberian cats, for example, are genetically very close to their ancestors, because they are always crossed with each other and never with other breeds.
In short: natural cat breeds exist, but they are fewer and fewer and are increasingly modified by humans for their own (almost always selfish) reasons.
