Big Maine Coon Cat

Big Maine Coon Cat - photo copyright BeryIM - the judge said the cat "unfolds" indicating that Maine Coons are long and flexible more than simply big.


His name is Shooter. I think he is the biggest Maine Coon I've seen - photo is copyright wendyophoto - this is a very impressive photograph. Wendy says, "This HDR was made from a single RAW photo taken at ISO 1600".

There is a certain fascination with big animals including cats. In the UK there is the perennial sighting of the escaped big cat roaming around some parkland or farmland in the dusk. We never see evidence other than a poor quality picture. There are supposed to be dozens of wild beasts in England and someone I recall is setting up remote cameras to try and get that elusive evidence. Some think they might be large feral domestic cats. People do tend to exaggerate what they have seen.

In the same vein their is a fascination about the Maine Coon cat's size. We know that this breed can throw up some big cats but they are not all that big normally. And in any event if we are to compare cat breeds we should look at the average weight of male and female cats of each cat breed. The averages are much less than the one off large male.

All that said the Maine Coon is the largest cat breed if you're talking about CFA registered pure-bred cats. TICA register more cats and some are wild cat/domestic cat hybrids such as the Savannah and an F1 or F2 Savannah is bigger than a Maine Coon normally.

You'll get some oddities caused by an illness and you'll get some very fat cats, one is illustrated on this page. These are larger than normal but not for the right reasons. It is, I feel, rather pointless to isolate large domestic cats that are large because they are overweight or ill. Worse it is a kind of freak show.

One classic way of breeding larger domestic cats is through hybridization with wildcats as they are sometimes but not always larger than domestic cats. In fact I made a comparison between the large domestic cats and wild cats on the page linked to above. The Savannah is the classic large domestic cat/wildcat hybrid at F1-2 level. The thing is it is impractical to have domestic cats that are large beyond a certain threshold as keeping them requires special arrangements. In addition breeders need to breed the wildcat hybrids back to domestic cats for character. You can't really live with a wild cat in the house. This automatically reduces the size of the cat.

Abnormally large domestic cats of any breed including the Maine Coon is unlikely to happen because selective breeding over the years has dramatically narrowed the gene pool. Purebred cats often have a high Coefficient of Inbreeding as breeders search for the perfect appearance. This limits the occurrence of oddities in regards to size.

Apparently a Maine Coon has been 49 inches in length, that is about 4 feet. That said Main Coon cats are actually long rather than purely big. So a big Maine Coon cat will be very long and this is amply demonstrated in the pictures.

One last thing, photographic evidence requires some sort of scale to compare size with. A very big Maine Coon cat would look small against a very large person. And similarly you cannot tell a big Maine Coon cat from a photograph unless there is something in the picture to compare size with. There are also a number of hoax photographs on the internet. These are photographs manipulated using Photo shop type software.

Each picture on this page have been selected as showing a big Maine Coon cat with something to scale by. It is for that reason I am showing people as well as cats in the photograph.

All the photos are published here under creative commons licenses granted by the photographers and each is credited below as requested under the terms of the license.

Go to the Largest Domestic cat breed analysis

Photos:

• 2nd down this cat according to the person in the photo weighed about 25 lbs, the top end for a Maine Coon cat. copyright BeryIM
• 3rd down shows how long the Maine Coon can be copyright BeryIM
• 4th down well yes a big Maine Coon Cat and fat one too - copyright Foxtonque
  
• 5th down another large cat but the scaling is misleading because the cat is nearer the camera. photo copyright semarr. Taken at a CFA cat show

Big Maine Coon cat to Home page


He's a whopper and laid back to boot.

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