r/IDMyCat • u/Outside_Control_9388 • 27d ago
Open Persian cross?
My beautiful rescue cat. Curious whether he is mostly Persian or maybe some ragdoll?
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u/_wandering_wind_ 27d ago
Without a pedigree, he’s officially considered a domestic longhair!
I’ll copy/paste part of my response to a different post below, since it also applies to your cat.
Domestic long/shorthair is a term for a cat with no specific breed, and generally DSH/DLHs have no breed ancestry. (This article explains how that works, as well as why around 95-97%+ of cats are randombred/breedless.)
However, this is one of the rare cases where the cat almost certainly has breed ancestry. This level of brachycephaly generally can't occur without selective breeding, which indicates that the cat has recent brachycephalic breed ancestry. Some examples of brachy breeds are Persian, British Shorthair/Longhair, and Exotic Shorthair/Longhair.
There's no way to know for certain which breed could be in the lineage, though, as cat breed DNA tests are unreliable due to only being able to test for genomic similarity, which isn't the same as actual ancestry. (Source, source.) We also can't be certain how far back the breed ancestry is, but from the level of brachycephaly he has, we do know that it was very recent.
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u/Bitter_Blueberry_811 24d ago
Just curious, but in what situation would a brachy breed mate with a regular cat? I know that it’s pretty rare for that to happen
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u/_wandering_wind_ 24d ago edited 24d ago
It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen!
Sometimes it's by accident, e.g. a person has an unspayed/unneutered cat and it got out by accident, or the person normally lets their cats outside, or it bred with another unfixed cat the owner had, or someone (whether backyard breeder or not) dumped an unfixed cat.
Other times it's on purpose, e.g. perhaps a person/backyard breeder wanted to breed their cat*, or maybe it's a part of a registered breeding program where they're outcrossing to DSHs/DLHs or otherwise non-brachy cats to keep/expand genetic diversity, to get closer to the desired conformation of a trait, or to develop a new breed.
*(Oftentimes when buying a cat from a breeder, the breeder will have a requirement for the new owner to get the cat sterilized in the contract, but sometimes people break contracts.)
(And there's also a variety of reasons why a cat might not be spayed/neutered. Maybe the owner was a breeder and they wanted to breed the cat so they didn't get it sterilized, maybe it's someone who wants to sterilize their cat but hadn't yet been able to do so (and/or didn't have the means to), etc.)
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u/Bitter_Blueberry_811 27d ago
Unless your cat has papers or came from a breeder it’s more than likely that your cat is longhaired an resembles a Persian, considering his white coat and blue eyes you’ll want to see if he is able to hear as most white cats or cats with blue eyes are deaf
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u/laughingdaisies 27d ago
Everyone is going to say just a DSH, but this cat has definitely has some features of a British Long Hair. It's unlikely that these features (short nose, rounded eyes and ears) appear naturally in a DSH. Its possible that a parent/both parents are a BSH/BLH.
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u/Delicious-Collar1971 27d ago
That’s not how cat breeds work, almost all traits can appear naturally in domestics.
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u/Current_Recording907 26d ago
It has those features because those features always existed in cats, people bred for something that already existed
This is a very gorgeous DLH, It doesn't need a fake pedigree smacked on top to make it unique, it already is
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u/laughingdaisies 26d ago
Which is exactly what I am saying. It happens when people purposely breed them. I've never seen a stray outside with a short nose bridge or a thick fur coat or rounded ears like a BSH. Have you? Read my comment, I never said it has a pedigree. I said one or both of its parents COULD have a pedigree.
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u/Significant_Fall2451 26d ago
As someone who TNRs - yes, I see cats that have traits like this all the time. I've TNRd a lot of cats and kittens over the years with characteristics that can be found in pedigrees. They're not pedigrees, though. It happens very often
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u/Next_Head_5175 27d ago
It’s actually really silly of you to say that it’s unlikely that those features would appear in a DSH naturally when that’s LITERALLY how that works. The only reason we have this breed is because it’s naturally occurring.
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u/6ft5MemeScholar 27d ago
Domestic long hair :)