The Maine Coon standard, read closely

The Maine Coon is one of the few breeds whose standard begins before the cat does: before the ears, before the coat, the standards ask for a rectangle. Read any of the published standards, FIFe, CFA, TICA or the LOOF, and the first demand is proportion. The body should be long, the chest broad, the legs substantial and level, the tail at least as long as the distance from shoulders to tail set. A judge who lifts a Maine Coon onto the table is measuring a shape before admiring a face.

For anyone comparing the standards side by side, a French-language cat journal keeps a useful parallel reading of the same texts, and it shows how much translation flattens them. The English originals are more precise about faults than most summaries suggest.

The head is a set of angles

The standard head is built from straight lines. The muzzle must be square and firm, neither pointed nor short; the chin lines up with the nose leather and upper lip in profile; the cheekbones are high. Ears are large, wide at the base, set high, and tipped with tufts that the American standards treat as desirable rather than essential. What the standards refuse is a round, sweet, short face. A Maine Coon that looks like a long-haired Persian has failed the first test, whatever its pedigree says.

The coat is meant to be uneven

New owners are often surprised that the standard asks for an untidy coat. The fur should be short on the shoulders, lengthening down the back and sides, with a full ruff at the chest and breeches on the hind legs. A silky, evenly long coat, the kind that photographs well, is precisely what the breed was selected not to have. The all-weather logic of the farm cat survives in the standard: a coat that sheds snow and mats slowly beats a coat that drapes.

Where the associations disagree

The texts diverge on details that matter to exhibitors. FIFe weighs ear placement heavily and penalises a narrow muzzle harder than CFA does. TICA admits more coat patterns than most European judges expect to see. GCCF historically refused colours showing Siamese pointing, a position shared by the other associations. The differences are small on paper and large in the ring, because a cat that wins under one standard can be merely typical under another.

The Register's reading is simple: the standard is a contract between the breed and its past. It describes a working cat from a cold state, enlarged by selection but not redesigned. When a line drifts toward the small, the cobby or the overcoated, the standard is the document that says so.

Size is a consequence, not a goal

The standard describes proportions and lets size follow. Nowhere do the texts reward a cat for being merely heavy, and the modern race for giant males sits awkwardly beside the written breed. A correctly built female at five kilograms is more Maine Coon than an overbred male at eleven, because the standard measures the shape of the cat, not the scale it stands on.

The temperament clause

Hidden in the standards is a clause most buyers skip: the breed is described as gentle, adaptable and unaggressive. Judges write it off as boilerplate until a cat proves it, when an animal that cannot be handled loses its placing regardless of type. The clause is the standard's quiet guarantee that the working cat's nature is part of the breed, not an accident of it.