Color pattern and eye color settle this pair. The Cat Fanciers’ Association requires a Ragdoll to be pointed with “large, vivid blue ovals” for eyes and disqualifies any other eye color. It requires a RagaMuffin to be anything except pointed, and allows “all eye colors, including odd-eyed.” What one must be, the other cannot.
That is unusually clean for a lookalike pair, and it means a single daylight photograph of the cat’s face usually points you at one of the two descriptions.
What is the first thing to look at?
The points, and then the eyes.
A pointed cat has a pale body with darker color concentrated on the ears, mask, paws and tail. CFA recognizes six point colors in the Ragdoll, seal, blue, chocolate, lilac, red and cream, and the points may be solid, lynx or parti-colored. The four permitted patterns are colorpoint, mitted, bicolor and van. Body or point color outside that list is a disqualification, as is any eye color other than blue.
The RagaMuffin standard runs the other way. “Every color and pattern is allowable with or without white, except pointed colors.” Pointed RagaMuffins exist, but CFA designates them for breeding only and they cannot currently be shown, and the breed’s disqualification list names pointed colors outright alongside crossed eyes, tail kinks and polydactyly.
So if the cat is pointed with blue eyes, you are looking at the Ragdoll description. If the cat is a solid, a tabby, a tortoiseshell or any of those with white, it cannot be a Ragdoll under the standard at all, and the RagaMuffin is the one that fits.
Eye color finishes the job on the ambiguous cases. Blue eyes are mandatory in one breed and merely permitted in the other, so blue eyes do not confirm a Ragdoll. Non-blue eyes do rule one out. Odd eyes, one blue and one another color, are allowed in the RagaMuffin and would disqualify a Ragdoll. The RagaMuffin standard even adds a rule most people never reach: mink colors must have aqua eyes and sepia colors must be yellow, gold or green.
Why is one breed pointed and the other is not?
Because pointing is a single temperature-sensitive mutation, and the two breeds made opposite decisions about it.
Lyons and colleagues identified the mutation in Animal Genetics in 2005, analyzing over 200 cats from twelve breeds plus randomly bred cats. The Siamese pattern traces to an exon 2 change in the tyrosinase gene, a glycine to arginine substitution at position 302, and every cat in their sample with a pointed coat carried two copies of it. The enzyme works poorly at normal body temperature and better at the cooler extremities, which is why the color collects on the ears, face, feet and tail and why the eyes come out blue.
The white on a mitted or bicolor Ragdoll is a separate gene again. David and colleagues reported in G3 in 2014 that white spotting in cats comes from a full-length feline endogenous retrovirus element in intron 1 of KIT, with dominant white caused by a shorter long terminal repeat insertion at the same site. So a mitted Ragdoll is carrying a pointed coat and a white spotting allele at the same time, which is why the pattern varies so much between individuals within the same permitted pattern.
None of this is visible in a photograph as genetics. It is visible as a shape: color where the cat is cool, pale where the cat is warm, and white wherever the spotting landed. CFA’s color guide is the reference for which of those combinations has which name.
Do the bodies differ?
Less than the color does, and this is where competitors usually start and should not.
Both are large, rectangular, heavily boned longhairs. The Ragdoll standard asks for a body “large and long, broad and solid, with heavy boning,” rectangular in shape. The RagaMuffin standard asks for a body that is “rectangular, broad chest and broad shoulders, and moderately heavy muscling in the hindquarters.” Neither show standard sets a weight; the weights people quote come from the CFA breed profiles alongside them, which give males reaching or exceeding 20 pounds for the Ragdoll, with full size at around four years, and up to 20 pounds for a mature male RagaMuffin with females peaking closer to 15.
The heads are where a difference exists, and it is subtle. The Ragdoll head is “proportionately large with a broad, modified wedge that is equilateral in shape.” The RagaMuffin head is “a broad modified wedge with a pleasingly rounded appearance, with no obvious flat planes.” Both are modified wedges. One is described geometrically, the other is described as having no flat planes at all. In practice the RagaMuffin reads rounder and softer in profile, but this is a difference of degree, not a test you should rely on from one photo.
Ears are close enough to be no help. The Ragdoll’s are “medium-sized. Wide set and moderately flared, continuing the line of wedge.” The RagaMuffin’s are “medium in size, set as much on the side of the head as on the top of the head with slight flaring, tilted slightly forward.” Both standards ask for a moderately flared, forward-tilted ear, so do not try to separate the two cats here.
The coats differ in a way you can feel more than see. The Ragdoll’s is “naturally non-matting moderately long fur” characterized by “abundant guard hairs and minimal woolly undercoat.” The RagaMuffin’s is “medium to medium-long” with a texture that is “soft, dense and silky.” Guard hairs over very little undercoat versus soft and dense throughout.
Where does the split come from?
CFA’s RagaMuffin profile states it plainly: “In the early 1990s, a group of breeders formerly associated with Ann Baker, founder of the Ragdoll, chose to break away from her registry.”
That is the whole story of why two breeds look so similar. They share a foundation and then diverged on what was allowed, which is also why the standards read like a negotiated settlement. One kept the pointed coat and the blue eyes. The other opened the door to every color and closed it on pointing. The Ragdoll versus Birman comparison covers the other pair Ragdolls are confused with, where the white feet do the separating instead.
One number this post will not give you
A lifespan difference between these two breeds gets quoted constantly, always as a tidy pair of ranges. We went looking for a source. It is not in either CFA standard, and we found no veterinary or registry publication that reports separate figures for these two breeds. Two breeds that were the same breeding population thirty years ago would need a strong published reason to differ by years, and no such publication turned up.
So the honest position is that the number is unsourced, and repeating it would only launder it further. If you want to know about an individual cat’s health, that belongs with your veterinarian rather than with a breed average.
And the answer for most cats
Neither. A large, soft, long-coated, placid cat with no paperwork is most likely an unregistered domestic longhair, because pedigreed cats are a small fraction of all cats. Temperament is no help here either: both standards describe a docile, people-oriented breed, and plenty of unregistered cats are exactly that. The registry describes the breed, never the individual in your house.
If your cat is pointed with blue eyes, the Ragdoll description fits and is worth checking feature by feature. If it is any other color, the RagaMuffin description is the one to check. If the features scatter, that is not a failed identification, it is a mixed cat, which is what most cats are.
Photograph the cat in daylight, face on, so the point color and eye color both read, and again in profile so the head shape and coat length show. Cat Identifier returns the breeds your cat most resembles as a percentage mix with the traits behind each match. It reads visible likeness rather than ancestry, and only registration papers from a registry establish pedigree. For a comparison that turns on structure rather than color, Maine Coon or Siberian is the other pair people bring in most, and what breed is my cat covers the general order of checks.
Sources
- Ragdoll breed profile and show standard, The Cat Fanciers' Association
- RagaMuffin breed profile and show standard, The Cat Fanciers' Association
- Lyons et al., Tyrosinase mutations associated with Siamese and Burmese patterns in the domestic cat, Animal Genetics 36(2), 2005
- David et al., Endogenous retrovirus insertion in the KIT oncogene determines white and white spotting in domestic cats, G3 4(10), 2014
- Coat and Color Descriptions, The Cat Fanciers' Association