A house cat’s DNA is more than 95% tiger.

In news that may surprise cat owners but certainly won’t be unexpected to cats themselves, who hold justifiably high opinions of themselves, our feline friends share 95.6% of their DNA with tigers. This discovery was first made in 2013, when geneticists sequenced the genomes of tigers, lions, and snow leopards. 

Their research also found that tigers and what are now house cats first diverged some 10.8 million years ago, which isn’t especially long in evolutionary terms. The amount of shared DNA is the same percentage across all breeds, meaning your orange boy isn’t any more tiger than the calico down the street.