by Jazi » Thu Aug 23, 2012 7:41 pm
An all grey cat can also be any number of the breeds that include solid grey in their lineage. A cat with no papers can only be a mutt (moggie/DSH/DMH/DLH). This is because cat breeds, unlike dog breeds, mostly come from someone picking up a cat out of a barn or off the street or out of a specific area and saying "I like this, let's make more of them", so their lineages are not nearly as defined. In addition, purebred cats tend to be just as expensive if not moreso than dogs, especially for the rarer breeds, so you will not find nearly as many of them actually floating around in city shelters or off the street. Plus, most of the time purebred mixes are very rare and only occur when someone is attempting to make a new breed, meaning most of the time people who are not active in the cat breeding world do not have a mix of JUST two breeds but more like 10 or 20. The actual purebreds are very distinct, the lines between them are crisscrossed and blurred.
Going by coat, shape, or color is not an option. In every cat there exists the genes for every coat, color, and shape. You can have a heavy boned calico shorthair female and she dumps out a bunch of dainty red mackerel tabby mediumhairs. You can have a dainty cream marbled tabby mediumhair who has a litter of all "normal weight" longhair brown mackeral tabbies. I've rounded up black, red, calico, and white kittens from a calico mom and a black dad. Buddy of mine had a fairly generic shorthair brown tabby with a very heavy boned litter of longhair brown tabbies. Quite a few of the pointed breeds started because someone found a pointed kitten in a barn and thought they looked neat. Every cat traces it's roots back to that and as a result most cats today are not one breed but many.