what breed is a tabby cat

Here is the answer, and it surprises almost everyone. Tabby is not a breed. It is a coat pattern, and a cat of almost any breed, or no breed at all, can be a tabby. So when you ask what breed your tabby is, the honest reply is that its stripes tell you nothing about its breed at all. Here is what a tabby actually is.

A tabby is any cat wearing the tabby coat pattern, the familiar look of stripes, swirls, or spots, usually with a distinctive marking on the forehead that resembles the letter M. That pattern can appear on a pedigree Maine Coon, a British Shorthair, a Bengal, or the ordinary moggy asleep on your radiator. The tabby is the most common look in the whole cat world precisely because it is not tied to any one breed. It is a pattern that turns up everywhere.

why so many cats are tabbies

The reason is written into feline history. The tabby pattern is essentially the ancestral, wild-type coat of the cat, the camouflage the domestic cat's wild ancestors wore, and every domestic cat carries the genes for it. In many cats the pattern is simply visible; in others it is masked by other genes, for solid colour or for white, but the tabby blueprint underneath is almost universal. This is why tabbies are everywhere and why the pattern crosses every breed boundary. It is the default the cat keeps returning to.

the types of tabby

There is more than one tabby, which adds to the confusion. The main patterns are the mackerel tabby, with narrow vertical stripes like a fish skeleton, the classic or blotched tabby, with bold swirls and a target-like mark on the flank, the spotted tabby, whose stripes break into spots, and the ticked tabby, where the pattern all but vanishes into a salt-and-pepper coat, as seen in the Abyssinian. Many tabbies also come in a patched form combined with other colours. All of them share that giveaway M on the brow, which folklore has attached to everything from the Virgin Mary to the prophet Muhammad, depending on who is telling the story.

so what breed is your tabby

If your tabby came from a registered breeder with papers, its breed is whatever those papers say, and the tabby coat is just its colour pattern. If it came from a shelter, a friend's litter, or turned up at your door, then in all likelihood it is a domestic shorthair or domestic longhair, which is the proper term for a cat of mixed or unknown ancestry, the wonderful, common, non-pedigree cat that most of us share our lives with. That is not a lesser cat. It is simply a cat whose breed is nobody, and whose pattern happens to be tabby.

One myth worth putting down while I am here: the tabby pattern says nothing about personality. There is no reliable evidence that tabbies share a temperament, any more than brown-haired people do. Your tabby's character comes from the individual cat, not its stripes.

If you genuinely want to know your cat's likely breed heritage rather than its pattern, the honest tools are a good look at its build and features, a vet's opinion, or a feline DNA test. But for most tabbies the truthful and perfectly happy answer is that they are magnificent moggies wearing the oldest coat in the book.

Related reading from my desk: what breed is an orange cat, what breed is a calico cat, and the full cat breeds guide.

To identify a cat's actual breed ancestry rather than its coat pattern, a feline DNA test or a vet's assessment is the way. I am a cat with opinions, not a veterinarian.