Last Updated on August 29, 2026 by admin
You have watched your cat do this and nobody believed you.
Most cats go up a tree beautifully and come down like a mistake — backwards, scrabbling, tail-first, ending in a drop they clearly did not plan. Your Norwegian Forest Cat turns around at the top and walks down face-first, unhurried, the way a person takes stairs.
It is not a fluke and it is not showing off. According to the Cat Fanciers’ Association, the Norwegian Forest Cat can run down a tree headfirst because of its “toe-out” stance. CFA breeder Nancy Kerr of Kerrisma Cattery in Eastern Canada states it plainly: Wegies can and do go down vertical surfaces — cat poles, trees — head first.
The feet are the whole story
A Norwegian Forest Cat’s hind legs sit higher than its front legs, and its paws are broad enough to spread its weight over snow instead of punching through it. The toes angle outward instead of pointing straight ahead. That outward set is what lets the back feet catch a vertical trunk on the descent rather than skidding down it.
The coat was built by the same weather. TICA’s breed standard describes a dense woolly undercoat beneath long, coarse guard hairs that repel water outright — the reason a Wegie can come in from sleet looking mildly inconvenienced.
California breeder Lorraine Shelton calls the spring molt “shedding their winter pajamas.” It is the one stretch of the year the coat needs more than a weekly comb.
The thing non-owners never expect
Closed doors.
Ask any Wegie owner and you will get the same complaint. “They don’t like closed doors, because they don’t know what’s happening behind them,” Shelton told CFA. They are not trying to get into the bathroom. They are trying to audit it.
Nancy Kerr taught her first Norwegian to climb a step stool. The trouble was that he would climb it while she was standing on it. Her brother, she says, met her first Wegie female on the other side of a muffin he was trying to eat.
They also barely meow. A Norwegian Forest Cat runs on chirps and trills — a sound most owners describe as commentary rather than conversation.
A cat that came over on a longship
Norwegian folklore tells of the skogkatt, a mountain-dwelling fairy cat that could climb sheer rock faces other cats could not manage. The Norse goddess Freya was said to travel in a chariot pulled by them. Once you have watched a Wegie descend a tree face-first, the myth stops sounding like a myth and starts sounding like an eyewitness account.
Viking explorers likely carried Forest Cats aboard ship to keep the rodents down, which means the breed may have reached the east coast of North America in the late 900s AD — roughly five centuries before Columbus.
Then it almost disappeared. The Norwegian Forest Cat Club formed in Oslo in 1938, and the Second World War pushed the breed near extinction before an official breeding program brought it back. King Olav V named it the official cat of Norway. A breeding pair did not reach the United States until November 1979, and CFA granted the breed full championship status in 1993.
What living with one is actually like
Steadfast, but on its own terms. “I can’t promise lap cats all night, but they are steadfast companions in our home,” says Brook Cole, CFA Breed Council Secretary and owner of Nordictale Cattery.
Wendy Carson of WorkingCat Cattery in Hanover, Massachusetts had a Wegie named Bandit who parked himself on the edge of the tub during her showers and, more than once, climbed in. She kept a spare towel on hand to dry him off afterward. Her cat Truggy walks the family to the door nearly every morning before work.
Maryland owner Linda Wurzburger says hers walk on a leash, come when called, and ride in the car alongside the family’s Siberian Husky. When one of her Norwegians died, the family adopted two — because the survivor clearly wanted a pack.
The one thing everyone gets wrong
Strangers will call your cat a Maine Coon. The profile settles it: a Wegie’s nose runs long and straight from brow to tip with no dip or break, and the head is an equilateral triangle. Maine Coons have a visible concave curve in the profile and a squarer muzzle.
The second misconception is grooming. A semi-long water-repellent coat sounds like daily work, and it is not — a weekly combing holds a Norwegian Forest Cat in condition for most of the year. The winter pajamas are the exception, not the rule.
Everything else about this cat is exactly as strange as it looks. It will supervise your shower, object to your doors, chirp at your birds, and then walk down a tree the wrong way around like it is nothing.
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