The cat breeds here carry eight trait ratings each, on a one-to-five scale, from the source that records them. It is tempting to rank breeds on all eight. Four of them cannot be ranked at all, and knowing which is more useful than any list built on them.
The four that say nothing
Affection rates 51 of the 56 rated breeds at the maximum. Child-friendliness puts 48 of them on the same value — and gives no breed the top mark at all. Dog-friendliness has 43 at the maximum, intelligence 37. A column where four in five entries are identical cannot separate them, so an article ranking the most affectionate cat breeds would be ranking a tie and inventing the order.
That is not a flaw in the source so much as a fact about it. It is describing cats generously, one breed at a time, rather than scoring them against each other. Reading it as a league table is the reader's error, and most sites that quote these numbers make it.
The four that work
Vocalisation splits the catalogue almost in half — 24 breeds at the quietest rating against 16 at the loudest. Grooming is lopsided but real: 30 breeds at the lowest level, three at the highest. Shedding separates ten breeds at the bottom from a large middle. Energy puts 22 breeds at the top against three at the bottom. Those four are worth filtering on, and the breeds page does.
Why this site says so out loud
Because the same discipline runs through everything here. The name catalogue counts real registrations and leaves a field blank when nothing was recorded, rather than filling it with a plausible default. A breed rating that cannot discriminate is the same problem in a different column, and pretending otherwise would buy a few pages at the cost of the thing that makes the rest trustworthy.
Dog breeds carry no trait ratings here at all, for the same reason: no source offers them in a form worth publishing, so the fields stay empty instead of being guessed.
Which cat breed is the most affectionate?
The records cannot say. Fifty-one of the 56 rated breeds carry the identical top affection score, so any ordering of them would be invented rather than measured.
Which cat breed ratings are actually useful?
Vocalisation, grooming, shedding and energy. Each of those spreads breeds across the scale widely enough to compare them; affection, child-friendliness, dog-friendliness and intelligence do not.
Why do dog breeds have no trait ratings?
No source publishes them for dogs in a form this catalogue would trust, so the columns are left empty. An empty field is honest; a guessed one is not.