Dogs apparently all belong to a breed, and there appear to be about a zillion of them. If a dog is a mix, then we call them a mutt, mongrel, mixed breed, etc.
Yet the same doesn’t seem to hold true of cats. While there certainly are breeds (e.g. Siamese, Maine Coon, Manx), the average house cat seems to me to be just…a cat. There are obviously various colorings (tabby, salt and pepper, calico, orange marmelade, black, white, etc.) but these colorings apply to many of the cats that belong to a recognizable breed as well. I get the impression that most cats don’t have features that are distinctive enough to make them recognizable as a specific breed.
Does that mean that many cats are not of any breed? Or do the “breedless” cats that I see in the average cat actually belong to a breed or breeds, and if so, to which?
One difference is that what we know as cat “breeds” are a fairly recent phenomenon – most of them have only been developed through selective breeding over the past 75 years, whereas dog breeds have been developed over the past hundreds of years.
Another difference is that dog breeding was often done to select traits for certain tasks (e.g., herding, guarding, hunting, etc.), moreso than for looks. Cats have a narrower range of “tasks” that they do for humans (mostly either companionship or pest control), and so, most of them are still fairly similar in their overall shape and size, and there are far fewer recognized cat breeds than dog breeds.
The biggest difference is probably that, for most of history, cats haven’t been so much domesticated as just co-existing. Mostly what we want cats to do is exactly what they do naturally, anyway, and so as long as they keep the rodent population down, we just let them keep on doing it.
Okey-doke… let’s start with the idea that all dogs have a breed. A lot, maybe most dogs would be considered mixed breeds. And the vast majority of dog breeds were developed recently also. Yes, a bunch of them go back 200 years but considering how long people and dogs have lived together that’s very recent. The term ‘breed’ is based largely on characteristics such as appearance and behavior as opposed to genetics.
So any cat or dog might satisfy the defined characteristic for some particular breed, but also do so for multiple breeds or seem to be unique.
A “breed” is a group of animals which has been genetically isolated from the surrounding population and selected for a defined phenotype for enough generations that it can be identified as different than the surrounding population. For obvious reasons, the genetic isolation part has always been a big challenge with cats. Plus, cats, unlike dogs, have never been bred for specific purposes that would create a need for genetic isolation and selection.
The majority of dogs are either mutts (enough generations of free reproduction that any particular breed in the mix is hard to guess), or crossbreds between two or three known breeds, either accidentally or on purpose. But of course there are a lot of “registered purebreds” too. Dogs’ mating behavior is easier to control, and there have for thousands of years, real reasons to select for specific traits, such as herding, drafting (like sled dogs), and hunting. All the sight and scent hound, terrier, and gun dog breeds (spaniels, retrievers) were developed for hunting.
The hobby of breeding solely for a specific codified appearance which is then adjudicated via a beauty contest, dates from the Victorian era for dogs, and mid-twentieth century for cats. These beauty contests required the parentage of the contestants to be registered in a stud book for x number of generations, so although it is a ‘construct’ it is one with rigid rules. This hobby has had a big influence on pet dogs, I don’t think it even now has much to do with the average cat.
I mean, isn’t this essentially the same question as, “Do all humans belong to a race?” Yes, if you decide to name all the combinations that come up, I guess? Breeds and races aren’t biological terms, last I knew; they’re matters of convention. Dogs and cats can easily produce viable offspring across their various breeds and people can easily produce viable offspring across their various races. If some new combination arises, you just give things of that type a name, and in so doing they belong to a breed/race: Labradoodle, Melungeon, etc etc.
I guess another consideration is whether a breed “breeds true”. That is if members of the breed, when interbred, never yield offspring that don’t have the defining characteristics of the breed. Sort of like avoiding the odd red headed child. One hears the idea that if left to themselves to interbreed, dogs will revert to the wolf, or a least a more generic wild dog. But if they are only reproduce within the breed, how much will they stay?
With cats there is the curious breeding or Siamese, Burmese and Tokinese. The Tokinese is a Siamese Burmese cross. But there is apparently only one gene difference, and the offspring of Tonkinese can be Burmese, Siamese or Tokinese.
I think the word “breed” is confusing the argument, because it is loaded with human “race” connotations. The point is that all cats (and dogs) belong to one species. Breeds are artificially selected traits that keep more or less true when breeding, but the dogs themselve do not care: Dogs recognize other dogs, no matter how diverse the “breed” and show more interest in each other than in non dogs. The remarcable thing is that dogs show the biggest morphological variation of all animal species, or so this article from PLoS claims. Still they belong to only one species. Like all domestic cats do too. Cats show less morphologic diversity (i.e.: look more like one single “breed” to us humans) because of genetics (see article). Same happens with us humans, btw: the differences are pretty small compared with dogs, even if we make a lot of fuss about those minor trait variations (colour of the skin, form of the eyes, texture and colour of hair, size variation under 100% and… not much more, is there?). It is the dogs that are the outliers, not the cats or us.
As mentioned, dogs were generally bred for work, cats for looks. I believe the fact that cats are only semi-domestic, unlike dogs, who are fully-domesticated, also factors into cats’ lack of morphological variation.
However, my cats do belong to a separate species: Felis assholus.
And the key takeaway from that article is that the diversity is due to the phenotypic diversity impact driven by a remarkably few genes.
Unclear if the same small number of genes having such impact would true for cats.
Anyway … size wise there would not be much demand for miniature or giant cats (the latter would be scary to have in house!) like there is for dogs, and yeah as pointed out, cats have two jobs: mouser and worshipped companion. Not much demand to breed them other tasks.
I wonder whether it would be possible to breed a cat that does not hunt birds to extinction. Probably not, breeding such a fundamental part of an animals behaviour away would make a cat no longer a cat.
Apart from that I see no way to improve cats by breeding.
One item I recall said that dog variation - long vs very short legs for the same body size, pug noses - the genes that regulate these, as the article says, are a very few and changes to these affect for example the difference between a doberman and a daschund. These few genes can turn off “grow the legs” without turning off “grow the torso/ grow the rest”. Seems the same for ears and snout. For cats it appears these development process genes are not as fragile or there are multiples so they don’t suffer these changes as easily.
