Long haired cat coats

Long haired cat coats - a very long haired black (smoked?) Persian cat. Black hair mats less apparently. Is such long hair natural - it depends - photo copyright alasam.

Are long haired cat coats natural? The long haired Persian particularly can have very long hair indeed. It'll need human grooming as the cat cannot cope on her own. If the cat is a purebred Persian Longhair, a show cat, then the hair will be unnaturally long. Or will it?

It very much depends on your point of view. All the wild cats that I have seen including the Scottish wild cat have short but dense fur. You don't see long haired cat coats on wild cats. Scotland can be pretty cold and wet but nature has decreed that the best coat for these conditions is the one found on the Scottish Wild cat - a typically thick but controllable tabby coat.

But wild cats are wild cats and domestic cats are different or at least we want them to be different. Even though one originates in the other. So if you think that the domestic cat is a completely different animal to the wild cat and is meant to live on carpet and sofas etc. then pretty well anything goes as long as health is not compromised in the breeding process.

That said it seems silly to me that fur should be bred so long that the cat can't groom herself successfully and needs us to help. That seems unnatural even for a completely domestic cat.

If you think that we like domestic cats because she is a true cat meaning that she has retained a lot of the characteristics of a wild cat, then to breed very long fur looks wrong and it doesn't matter if the cat is an indoors cat or not.

I'm of the second category. I like things natural and normal and believe that if we stray too far from the natural balanced cat we face problems of health and contentment for the cat.

Apparently the dilute colors (cream for example) mat more than the solid colors (black for example). It may have something to do with the hair strands being finer in dilute colors.

You don't see wildcats with matting as far as I know. Nature would have let the cat down if she had allowed the cat to evolve with a coat that matted. Matted coats are less effective at keeping out the cold and wet.

One last point, some animals other than cats have very long fur so very long fur is not unnatural but quite unusual.

Long haired cat coats to grooming a Persian cat