What kind of cat is that?

 When I first got Tiger, I took a bunch of pictures of him. I was really excited about  getting to keep my business partner's cat. I guess at the time I got him he was still technically a kitten. He was kind of in that stage where he was I guess you could say kind of middle sized, kind of growing into a full grown cat but not quite there yet. I had no idea though that it was soon going to be my cat. Other friends who knew that I was keeping my business partner's cat said that they could have almost predicted that Tiger would end up being my cat permanently. One of the questions that I got when I first got the cat and was showing people pictures of him was. "What kind of cat is that?" I thought it was just a regular tabby cat and that's what I told people that he was.

My business partner Alex has a series of shops in the city that we live in, and the business that I was running with Alex was conducted in an office in the back of one of his shops. It was basically the one that was a convenient commute for both of us. We were both there working one day, and the subject of cats came up. I was busy looking at the list of the huge amount of phone calls I had to return that day, so I was just sort of hearing everything they were saying, but I couldn't help but overhear Alex say that Tiger is a main coon. Wait what I asked. Alex explained to me that Tiger, the cat that he had asked me to keep for him was 50% main coon. I told Alex that I found that interesting because people kept asking me what kind of cat he was. I also told Alex that I was telling everyone that Tiger was a tabby cat because that is what it looked like he was to me. This girl that was working the register at the shop where we were conducting our business in the back office showed me picture of how big a main coon cat can get. I was amazed to find out that the main coon cat can actually get to be the size a black lab or golden retriever just without the long legs. I might be exaggerating a little bit but these cat's can get big.

My thinking on why people were asking me what kind of cat Tiger was, is because of his fur. He did have a little bit more fur than most cat's do. I guess you could say that his fur was like that of a Persian or a Himalayan cat, but I don't know it even looked different than those two cat breeds. When people are asking a cat owner who is not all that familiar with the different kinds of cat breeds, such as myself it makes the person who owns the cat kind of wonder why they are asking them that. 

The main coon cat breed is not as uncommon as one might think it is. In fact I was amazed not only at just how many people actually knew what a main coon cat was, but also about how many online articles there were about this particular cat breed. I was coming across articles on this particular type of cat breed on both yahoo news and google news. Not only that I found out from a search on the particular cat breed that brought me to Wikipedia that the main coon cat breed really became popular in 2020.

According to what I read off of Wikipedia the Main Coon cat breed is a mix between what is thought to be a Siberian cat and a regular cat, However my research from Wikipedia on the particular cat breed also suggested that some people think that the main coon is a mix between the Norwegian forest cat and that is the cat that bread with the regular cats. Either way also according to Wikipedia these cat breeds that are thought to have bread with the regular tabby cat were brought over from the people that were crossing the oceans to reach the new world.

I really thought I had never seen a main coon cat before, but when I really actually thought about it. I actually thought I think I actually have seen a main coon before. It was when I was in my pre teens so it had to have been around 1994 or 1995. We were always taking trips to see my grandparents on both my mothers side and my father side of the family. This was on weekends and it was convenient to do so because they lived in a town that was about three hours away. My grandparents on my mothers side of the family lived in a neighborhood where there were a lot of people who owned cat's and there were always a lot of stray cat's wandering around. There was one weekend we were there and all of us kids were outside playing with the neighborhood cat's and we wandered around the back of the house and saw this huge orange cat in the bushes. It was bigger then most cat's I had scene and bigger than all of the cat's in the neighborhood. The adults were telling all of us kids to stay away from that cat. My dad thought that it might have been a mountain cat. I think it was a main coon.

One of the things I have noticed when I post up ad's of the kittens that I am selling that are the offspring of my 25% main coon cat's is that people tend to respond very quickly to my ads. I get the feeling that they know that these kittens have a certain percentage of main coon in them. I say this because I have had people actually try to steel my cat's. I also say this because another interesting fact that I found when researching the main coon cat bread in Wikipedia is that there have actually been reports of people actually stealing these cat's from other people.