Rex and hairless cat breeds

The breeds

Several different genes, one shared inherited disease in the Devon Rex and Sphynx, and a level of skin care nobody puts in the monthly budget.

Cornish RexWhat a Cornish Rex actually costs in India, why the two Indian sources that publish a price do not overlap at all, what a coat...Devon RexWhat a Devon Rex actually costs in India, why published prices differ by three and a half times, the COLQ myopathy this breed...DonskoyWhy the Donskoy's hairlessness is dominant and not the Sphynx's mutation, what that changes about the questions you ask a...German RexOne rex mutation, two breed names, and a French studbook that demands two DNA tests the ranking pages say are unnecessary.LykoiA partially haired cat whose coat is caused by loss-of-function variants in Hairless, not by any rex gene.PeterbaldA Russian hairless breed built from a Donskoy and an Oriental Shorthair in 1994, carrying a dominant hair-losing allele whose...Selkirk RexA curly-coated cat built out of Persians and British Shorthairs, whose curl was mapped to a single splice variant and whose...SphynxWhat a Sphynx cat actually costs in India, why published prices disagree by ten times, the 6.68 year life expectancy figure no...Ukrainian LevkoyA hairless cat with folded ears, built from a Donskoy and a Scottish Fold, held at provisional class by one Ukrainian registry...

Compare the breeds side by side

To compare these 9 breeds directly, read across the table rather than down the guides. Heat tolerance is a Bonbeno rating out of 5 for Indian conditions, and the reasoning behind each one sits on the breed's own page.

What matters in this group

The points below are what the evidence on these 9 guides actually supports, not what the category is assumed to mean.

• The three coats are not variants of one thing. The Devon curl is a recessive KRT71 splice change, the Cornish is an LPAR6 deletion, and the Sphynx is a separate mutation again. A test mating in 1961 between a Cornish and a Devon produced all straight-coated kittens, which settled the question decades ago. The six breeds added to this page keep the pattern. The German Rex carries the same LPAR6 deletion as the Cornish, the Selkirk Rex curl is a separate KRT71 splice site variant mapped in 2013, the Lykoi's sparse roan coat comes from loss-of-function variants in the Hairless gene, the Donskoy's hair loss is an incompletely dominant allele distinct from the Sphynx mutation, the Peterbald's gene has not been identified and the Sphynx gene has been formally excluded as its cause, and the Ukrainian Levkoy adds the Scottish Fold's TRPV4 ear mutation on top of Donskoy hairlessness. Rex is a description, not a gene.
• The shared disease is worth knowing before buying. A COLQ founder mutation began in the Devon Rex and spread into the Sphynx through outcrossing, producing a congenital myasthenic syndrome in which creatine kinase and AST read normal, so a routine blood panel will not find it.
• Sun and skin are the Indian-specific risks. A sparse or absent coat leaves skin exposed, and the ears are both the least protected site and the site where solar damage is documented to begin. Any advice to keep these cats in an outdoor enclosure in India should be ignored. Two members read differently. The Selkirk Rex is a dense-coated rex whose curl sits on a full coat of guard, down and awn hairs, whose closest relatives are the Persian and the British Shorthair, and whose Indian risk is heat rather than sun. The Lykoi's page reports that nobody has shown the breed sunburns, so the Sphynx's sun record is not transferred to it; its cost is skin care, with the highest skin monitoring rating on the site.