Cat breed
A moggy is any cat which has not been intentionally bred. Moggies lack a consistent appearance unlike purebred cats that are selectively bred for appearance conforming to a standard. In contexts where cats need to be registered—such as in veterinary practices or shelters—moggies may be called domestic short-haired (DSH) or domestic long-haired (DLH) cats, depending on coat length (and less common designations may include "domestic medium-haired (DMH)" or "domestic semi-long-haired").
The vast majority of cats worldwide lack any pedigree ancestry.
History: Having apparently originated in Western Asia, domestic long-haired cats have been kept as pets around the world for several centuries. During the 16th century, the first long-haired cats were imported into Europe. In the mid-17th century, when the Great Plague of London decimated much of London's human population, the number of cats started to recover after centuries of persecution, as they were encouraged as protectors from flea-carrying rats.
How the variant developed is still a matter of speculation. The long coat may have been the result of a recessive mutant gene. When a long-haired cat is mated to one with a short coat, only short-haired kittens can result; however, their offspring, when mated, can produce a proportion of long-coated kittens. Successive litters of early European long-haired cats produced more and more long-coated offspring, which were more likely to survive in the cooler European climates. By the year 1521, around the time they were first documented in Italy, the variety had become fixed after only a few generations.
In the late 18th century, Peter Simon Pallas advanced the hypothesis that the manul (also known as Pallas's cat) might be the ancestor of the long-haired domestic cat. He had anecdotal evidence that established, even though the male offspring would be sterile hybrids, the female offspring could again reproduce with domestic cats and pass on a small proportion of the manul's genes. In 1907, zoologist Reginald Innes Pocock refuted this claim, citing his work on the skull differences between the manul and the Angoras or Persians of his time. This early hypothesis overlooked the potential for crossbreeding within the family Felidae. For example, the Savannah cat is a crossbreed between a domestic short-haired cat and a wild serval—both of which have different skulls and evolutionary lineage. Furthermore, hybrid females in the related genus Panthera, such as ligers and tigons, have successfully mated, producing tiligers and litigons.
