Mystery Cat- Help!

Sorry if this is the wrong place to put this...but how do I know if me cat is a DSH or a Bengal? I know that sounds weird, but...

I was thinking about Bengals from Lil_Red's posts (she's getting a Bengal kitten) and I've always thought they were a neat sounding breed. So I looked them up and my cat looks just like that! He's a feral that I got at 5 weeks old (him, not me :tounge2: ) and now he's 7 months old and HUGE!

Also, he is a grey/brown tabby with beautifully wild markings and a funny striped tail that look just like the pics I saw on the Bengal site. And he has the gold underfur like they mention, and when I looked at him compared to a DSH breed pic and a Bengal breed pic, he looked more like the latter.

Is there some special way to tell? Maybe his mom was one, and dad the other? Either way, he's a doll, well, a wild and crazy doll, but a doll all the same.

Any advice, comments, suggestions, whatever?

I'll try and post a good pic of him tomorrow, but I haven't been able to get any pics to work on this site so far.

I just wanted to say that maybe your vet would be able to give you some helpful information about your cat's breed.

I moved your thread to the breeders corner...I thought you might get more replies here. Sorry I am not much help with these kinds of questions, but someone here will be able to help you, I am sure.

The thing is, unless you have papers for the cat, or you have seen both its parents and all its littermates, there is no way to tell if it is a purebred. And, if he was adopted as a feral, the chances of him being any kind of pure breed is slim to none.

All cats exhibit some sort of trait that is found in some sort of breed, because the breeds are overwhelmingly man-made. That is, someone once decided they liked the spotted tabbies, and set out to "make" a breed. In order to be a purebred, though, they must breed "true". In other words, in order for a Bengal to be a pure Bengal, it must mate with a Bengal and all its kittens must also be Bengals.

I get really exasperated at people who claim to have, say, a Maine Coone, when the cat's mom was a shorthair, and/or its littermates were short hairs.

By the same token, there is no way you can ever know for sure a cat is "part" anything unless you have seen the papers of the mother or father. Even though I have a cat with a short, gnarled tail, a thick double coat, and long back legs who weighs in at twenty pounds, I do not call him a Manx nor do I claim he is part Manx, because I only know his mom, who exhibits none of those traits. So, the closest I will get is to say he appears to have some Manx blood, or he exhibits some Manx traits. It could simply be that he shares some of the same gene mutations that the Manx breed possesses, but in fact has no Manx in his ancestry at all.

So, just because your cat is a spotted tabby, you can't assume he is a Bengal, nor can anyone else - he probably is not.

But, this is a soapbox I have been on for years, and no one has listened to me yet, so I guess you can take it or leave it!

Be assured I have no notions at all of hom being a purebred! That would take almost unbelieveable odds in a feral, being that the parents bred of their own choice in the wild.

I just wondered if there were traits that were definately Bengal and not tabby, and vice versa.

I think he's both, actually.

He has rosettes and stripes, he has the gold underfur, but he doesn't look quite as leopard-y as the Bengals I saw.

He sure is a pretty boy though!

Well a Bengal is a tabby. Nearly everything is a tabby, Persians, Oritentals, Selkirk Rex, Maine Coon. Tabby is a color pattern, not a breed.

Here's some pics of him...I'll just post the links to the pages:

http://alicat613.tripod.ca/photopage-6.html

http://alicat613.tripod.ca/photopage-5.html

http://alicat613.tripod.ca/photopage-7.html

I think all tabby's are beautiful, especially the red ones. Every cat in the world has tabby in the gene pool. Really, the only thing that makes a Bengal what it is, is that it's foundation cat in the line was a wild cat. Most associations require at least a 5 generation pedigree in order to be in a show. This is because of the temperment of the wild cat. The patterns they get is from using a refined system of breeding cat A with cat B and so on. I went and looked at your baby, and yes he's a domestic short hair. It looks as if he's a brown Mackrel Tabby. Of course I didn't see all of his pattern but he's a real keeper

Yeah, I saw the mackerel pattern description, and that sounded like him, although they get pretty long-winded and technical in those descriptions! I don't care what he is. He has the absolute best personality and is growing up into such a beautiful and loving cat. I just wanted to post pics of him. Isn't he gorgeous? The pics don't even do him justice! Yeah yeah, I just might be biased!

LOL, I know some of the color descriptions can be pretty confusing. It takes a long time before it starts looking like english
He is an absolutely beautiful cat. He has AWSOME tabby markings. You know he's a true tabby because of the M on his forehead. He also looks like the stripes are semitrical which by definition would make him a mackrel tabby. If he had a large spot of white, he would be with white.

It's funny because my boyfriend always calls him a trout! Hee hee, but he's a mackerel! :tounge2: The descriptions are very confusing! I started just looking at pictures, which is very hard. I think the tabbies I was mostly looking at were the patchy kind? I don't know what that's called.

His markings are all symmetrical to my untrained eye, and his little necklace is unbroken. He doesn't really have any white, just a tiny brushing under his chin, but has a lot of gold on his underside.

He's such a pretty and spoiled boy! He's sure come a long way from being a poor skinny feral kitten!