My 7 year old son has an interest in coins often wanting to help me CRH and he likes filling up folders (state quarters, etc). Recently he asked if he had a wheat cent folder like mine, he doesn't so he asked for one. Of course being 7 his interest waxes and wanes but then again so does mine, haha. I'm happy to oblige when he's interested. That being said we were talking about how I'm working on getting 1 coin from every country for my birth year and we came up with an idea for a collection he'd like to work on. He decided he wants to collect coins with cats - Lions, tigers, panthers, house cats, etc etc. I thought this seemed like a feasible "low budget" collection we could work on. My thought is that world coins are probably my best bet for finding felines. So my question after all that is - where's a good place to look for feline related coins. I'm sure certain countries have a tendency to them more than others. I don't have an LCS to go poke around at, I've thought about just buying a pound of foreign coins to go through and see what we find.
Lions are one of the most common animals to be on coins, but a lot of them are stylized in a way that might not be what you're looking for, like the British Scottish shillings with the lion on the throne with a sword in its hand. But there are a lot of cat coins out there. I'd suggest just go on eBay to the world coins category and search for things like cat, tiger, lion, panther, leopard, etc. I think the Isle of Man had a series featuring cats once too.
Here's some more. And I know some of these are out of a 7-year-old's price range (I have a 6-year-old coin collector myself) but just an idea of what's out there.
Those are some great examples, thanks! You're right that the "royal" lions with the shield, etc are probably not what we're looking for. Those silver ones are purdy and maybe something to strive for down the road should he stick with it. I actually think I have a housecat coin from Isle of Man somewhere, I'll have to look later.
A friend of mine started this site. It is worth saving the site in your references for any number of uses: https://www.coinzoo.net/
Those are some nice examples posted above. But as for buying foreign coins by the pound, my guess is you would get hardly if any cat coins, excepting the stylized lions.
Thought I'd come back and update this thread. I've spent some time doing a bit of research and created a little spreadsheet of possible coins for my son's collection. I used CoinZoo and Numista for reference. Searching for cat or feline on Numista gets you ALOT of results so I had to narrow it down. For now our list consists of coins made since 1950 (chosen somewhat arbitrarily). None of the coins contain precious metals (a few are 50% silver) and the cat needs to be the main feature. So if it's just a smaller detail, it doesn't make the list. In addition, things like lions on a coat of arms and things like that also don't make the list. That being said, I was able to come up with about 180 different coins from around the world. That doesn't include multiple years, so if the same design was made 1980-1985, those get lumped together. I was surprised to learn a few countries actually feature a big cat on the obverse of much of their coinage, Congo being one of them. So anyway I just wanted to share my findings in case anyone else comes along with a similar interest.
