RagaMuffin vs Ragdoll: One Founding Story, Two Opposite Rulebooks

These two breeds share a founding population and then wrote opposite rules, and one pair of rules tells them apart at a glance. A show Ragdoll must be a blue-eyed pointed cat, full stop. A RagaMuffin can be any color and pattern EXCEPT pointed, with any eye color. We re-read both breeds' current CFA and GCCF standards side by side for this page, because most comparisons on this topic recycle each other. Here is what the documents themselves say.

The eye and coat rules, from the standards

The Ragdoll side is a hard rule: vivid blue eyes, pointed coat, and a breed-wide disqualification for anything else. The RagaMuffin side is the mirror. CFA's standard asks for "large, walnut shaped" eyes in ANY color (narrowed only inside the mink and sepia classes). The breed accepts every color and pattern except the pointed coat, one of the widest color ranges of any breed we cover. GCCF adds the honest nuance: the pointed gene has not vanished from the RagaMuffin pool. Its Mink pattern has simply been moved off the show bench. Even the eye SHAPE differs on paper: walnut for the RagaMuffin, oval for the Ragdoll.

The shared history, with the year told honestly

Both breeds descend from Ann Baker's IRCA breeding program (she trademarked "Ragdoll" and "Cherubim" in 1971 and ran her registry outside the mainstream ones). A group of breeders eventually broke away with their cats and needed a new name. CFA's page says "the early 1990s." GCCF's says 1994 and tells the naming story (a breeder proposed "Liebling"; Curt Gehm's "RagaMuffin" replaced it). ANCATS and the UK breed club both say 1993. Four institutions, three memories of one event: we print all three rather than picking. One claim we checked and rejected: a pet-blog's line that Himalayans were among the outcrosses appears in no registry document we read.

Recognition: the gap that surprises buyers

The Ragdoll is recognized everywhere that matters: TICA Championship since June 1979, CFA since 2000, GCCF since 1990. The RagaMuffin's set is real but different. ACFA Championship 2001. CFA registration 2003 and Championship 2011. GCCF Championship 17 June 2015. And at TICA, no public breed page and no championship path at all. The precise version of that last fact: TICA's own current Registration Rules list "Ragamuffin" under Category VI, "Experimental (Developing) Breeds", registration-only. So "is the RagaMuffin a real breed?" Yes, at three major registries, with one big registry tracking it only in its most open category. We say it that way rather than a flat yes or no.

Size and temperament: the non-differences, stated as such

Size does not separate them: every registry figure for both breeds lands in the same 10-to-20-pound band (4.5-9.1 kg). Anyone promising "the RagaMuffin is the bigger cat" is choosing between overlapping ranges. Temperament reads near-identically in both breeds' registry prose: docile, people-oriented, famously relaxed when held. One attribution matters. For the RagaMuffin, the "goes limp when held" line and the "gentle giant" phrase are GCCF's own words, thinner-sourced than the Ragdoll's well-documented equivalent. CFA's RagaMuffin prose never uses "limp" or "floppy" at all. Health talk differs mostly in paperwork: both carry the same R820W HCM story from the shared founding stock, which each breed's own page covers.