Devon Rex
A small, warm, impish creature who rides on shoulders.
- impish
- clownish
- shoulder-riding
- heat-seeking
- small
- people-obsessed
Why you are a Devon Rex
You are small, light, and permanently up to something. You ride on shoulders because it is both warm and a superior vantage point. You are a deliberate comedian — being laughed at is a success, and you will repeat whatever caused it. You seek out heat with real determination and will burrow under anything available. You are attached to your people in a way that is funny rather than needy, mostly because you are physically incapable of being solemn.
The real Devon Rex
A mutation-derived breed traced to a single curly-haired male kitten, named Kirlee, found in a litter born in a garden in Devon, England in 1959. CFA notes the Devon Rex has ranked among its top ten breeds for several years and was recently the most popular of all shorthaired breeds by registration. The coat is naturally curly, soft and fine in an open wave, and can be genuinely fragile and sparse. Here is the detail most breed writing gets wrong: the Devon and Cornish Rex curls are entirely different genes — Devon is recessive KRT71, Cornish is LPAR6 — so crossing the two produces only straight-coated kittens, which is precisely how they were established as separate breeds. The Sphynx hairless allele sits in that same KRT71 series and is dominant over the Devon curl.
- Registry status
- CFA: yes. TICA: yes. ⚠️ Exact CFA recognition year is not stated on CFA's breed page.
- Origin
- Devon, England — a mutation-derived breed.
- Coat
- Soft, fine, wavy and sparse, sometimes with bare patches; very large, low-set ears.
- Size (registry wording)
- CFA describes a hard-muscled, slender cat of medium fine boning — and unusually, CFA does give a figure: 6–9 lb.
- Weight — commonly cited, not registry-verified
- CFA itself gives 6–9 lb (2.7–4.1 kg) — one of the few genuine registry weight figures.
A note on those two figures. No cat registry publishes numeric weight ranges — CFA and TICA standards are descriptive — so any weight you see anywhere, including here, comes from commercial sources. And the two lifespan rows measure different things: life expectancy at birth includes kittens that do not survive, so it runs lower than the ranges breed guides quote. They are shown separately because averaging them would produce a number that is true of nothing.
Honestly, what is hard about a Devon Rex?
The sparse coat means this cat gets cold easily and needs warmth, and it is intensely people-focused, so it is a poor fit for a cool, empty house.
One more thing
The Devon Rex is one of the very few breeds for which CFA publishes an actual weight range — 6 to 9 pounds — since CFA standards are otherwise purely descriptive.
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