Possible Maine coon mix?

[thefiresidecat]

I have a cat I got back from the shelter, and they said he was a domestic medium hair. So how would you describe him if that doesn’t exist? He does not have the typical fluff of a long haired cat except in his tail and his guard hairs are a different color from his undercoat

long hair. it's either short hair or long hair. how old is your kitty. sometimes medium hairs fluff out to long hair in colder spells. I know my forest cats all do that.

 

[Mistawis22]

long hair. it's either short hair or long hair. how old is your kitty. sometimes medium hairs fluff out to long hair in colder spells. I know my forest cats all do that.

They said he was two. He does not act like a two year old. Extremely playful and runs everywhere. More like my other cats were at around a year to 18 months. He had clear stripes when I first saw him but those have mostly disappeared. When I brought him in he had a neck injury and all the fur was gone around his neck so he looks short haired around the head; the rest of him is longer but lays flat, no fluff really except underneath. His tail is the exception it’s like a fuzz bomb

 

[thefiresidecat]

They said he was two. He does not act like a two year old. Extremely playful and runs everywhere. More like my other cats were at around a year to 18 months. He had clear stripes when I first saw him but those have mostly disappeared. When I brought him in he had a neck injury and all the fur was gone around his neck so he looks short haired around the head; the rest of him is longer but lays flat, no fluff really except underneath. His tail is the exception it’s like a fuzz bomb

are they sure of the two years old thing? to me he doesn't look much older than an older kitten. I replied on y our other post too

 

[LunarFlower]

I have a cat I got back from the shelter, and they said he was a domestic medium hair. So how would you describe him if that doesn’t exist? He does not have the typical fluff of a long haired cat except in his tail and his guard hairs are a different color from his undercoat

Genetically, Domestic Mediumhair is just a longhair that doesn’t fully express the longhair gene to a great degree. If a cat isn’t shorthair, the longhair gene is likely present, but there are secondary genes that affect how long the long hair gets or where on the body it is found. In cats that are usually classed as mediumhair, they don’t have or express those secondary genes, leading to a longhair that isn’t as long haired as, say, a Persian, or is only long on the tail and haunches, for example. Breeding programs for longhair cats usually try to maximize the number of those secondary polygenes, leading to an extreme expression of the main longhair genes. That is why you usually don’t see randombred cats with Persian-like long, flowing locks, but it’s not uncommon to see a longhair cat with a moderately long coat from the general gene pool. It takes a lot of polygenes working together to make the extreme expression.

 

[sivyaleah]

I have a cat I got back from the shelter, and they said he was a domestic medium hair. So how would you describe him if that doesn’t exist? He does not have the typical fluff of a long haired cat except in his tail and his guard hairs are a different color from his undercoat

Long hair is what it would be technically.
Medium is used by a lot of people when the fur is clearly not short, but not as long as one expects to see from a long hair cat.