Persian Cat Facts

Ultra Persian Cat CFA champion apparently photo copyright alasam

Persian Cat Facts can be found in abundance of the Pictures of Cats.org website. One of the most interesting facts about Persian cats concerns the development of the Persian cat to the extent that we know have two separate breeds of cat. It has been a transformation.

Persian cat breeders in their desire to breed extremely saleable and outstanding Persian cats pushed the boundaries of the breed standard (the measure, in words, against which a purebred cat is to be judged as to whether the cat has a correct conformation for the breed i.e. has the correct type or is "typey" to use cat breeder language).

The more typey the better as far as some breeders are concerned. In striving for this goal set against a breed standard that could be interpreted with wide discretion the face of the sweet Doll Face Persian changed into a squashed face as if someone had simply pushed the face in.

Creating a face that unnatural was unfortunate. It was also unfortunate that the breed standard was then changed to accomodate the flat face. The crazy thing is that the Persian now suffers health problems associated with the flat face as is to be expected. What is even more astonishing is that visitors to my website prefer the old fashioned Doll Face Persian. Here is the result of an ongoing survey that will be updated regularly:-



You will find that a good percentage of the cats being bred are inbetween the extreme and the traditional. OK I've got that off my chest one more time. There are a lot more Persian Cat facts on this page which has links to other pages. Despite the drawback of health issues such as tear duct overflow requiring the area below the eyes regularly and heart disease problems and further the need to regularly groom the very long and thick coat this cat remains in the top 5 most popular domestic cats.

This may reflect the popularity of the doll face. Although, this is probably because Persian cats are seriously attractive cats and they have sweet characters which are well suited to indoor living. Indoor living in the US is a growing concept with a very high percentage of cat keepers keeping cats indoors permanently.


Pushka a Persian cat (she looks like a Traditional Persian from this angle) photograph copyright slight clutter under Creative Commons as is the header photograph.

There is a Persian cat rescue center in the UK, the owner of which says that the Persian cat is more prone to litter training problems than most other cats. This is probably due to stress as the Persian is a gentle cat. This sort of problem can lead to the human keeper having difficulty coping with the result that the cat (sometimes a purebred cat) being put into a shelter. This is despite the fact that a lot of cat breeders will take back cats if the new keepers are having problems. Cat breeders do this for the cat primarily as there is often no contractural obligation to accept the return of the cat.

The most important Persian cat facts concern health and the link above will take you to those. As there are a considerable number of Persians in rescue centers it would make sense to adopt from one of them. On this page is a short list of UK centers and on this page Californian centers.