7 Facts You Didn't Know About Orange Cats

Show Yourself hey everyone it's Mallory here with cats.com and this is my cat wessie and in this week's video we're talking about orange cat facts do they all share a single brain cell are they actually friendlier than other cats are they all male we're going to be answering those questions and more so stay tuned [Music] so my first fact about orange cats is that every single orange cat is also a tabby cat so Tabby is not a specific breed it is a coat pattern and it is coded for in the presence of the agouti gene in the pad so the aguti Jean causes the cat to have these multi-colored strands of fur that end up patterning across the body a cat with the aguti Jean is going to show up with one of five different Tabby patterns so you'll see the Mackerel tabby with its stripes or a classic tabby with broader swirls you'll see spotted tabbies with broken up Stripes that look like full spots and then you'll have tick tabbies which have a really even distribution of those multi-colored strands or they might be a patch Tabby which incorporates patches of orange and black and these cats are referred to as torpies because they are both tortoiseshell and tabbies the reason why all orange cats are going to be one of these Tabby types is because the gene that causes cats to have an orange coat inhibits the presentation of the non-agooty gene so it's an epistatic Gene it kind of turns off the other Gene that could cause the cat to have a solid coat so they just can't exist in the same cat a cat could look like they have a solid coat but if you look really closely you notice that that orange cat has kind of ghost tappy markings usually maybe a tick Tabby and it's just very very subtle but they are all tabby cats my second fact is that orange tabby cats are not a breed so we've established that they're all tabbies but Tabby is not a specific breed you can see this type of coat pattern and color in a wide variety of breeds you can see Maine Coons who are orange tabbies you can see Persian cats who are orange tabbies it shows up in a wide variety of different breeds in general if you don't know what breed your cat is you can either just say my cat is an orange cat or you can say they are domestic short hair medium hair or a domestic long hair this is kind of a catch-all term that we use to refer to a magi which is a cat that is not has not been selectively bred to be one specific breed my third fact also relates to the subject of breeding and this whole world of cat fancy and it is that orange cats are not officially described as orange so if you're talking to someone who's involved in cat fancy and they refer to an orange cat that you usually described their cat as a red or cream so a red cat is just a classic orange cat and then a cream cat has a dilution Gene that causes their fur to look more of a softer cream color now informally we can certainly refer to them as orange cats it's what makes most sense to me you'll also hear people say ginger cat marmalade cat some people will say tiger cat some will just call them Garfield cats and generally we all know what we're talking about so my fourth fact is that male orange cats are more common than females and this comes down to the way that the orange coat Works genetically so uh the orange coat Jean is connected to the X chromosome as you probably know male cats have an X and A Y chromosome and then female cats have two X chromosomes when we're deciding what color a cat is going to be we kind of have this rule of the dice between the black Gene and the orange Gene these are the two main colors that a cat can be and if a male cat gets an orange Gene whether it's the dominant or the recessive allele on that X chromosome they're going to be orange for female cats there are some more variabilities because they have two X chromosomes the possibilities are one you get a dominant orange allele on One X chromosome and a recessive one on the other and then what ends up happening is the black dominates on this one and the orange dominates on this one they come together to make a tortoiseshell cat the other possibility is that you have two recessive ones and they come together and you get a black cat or some variation on a black cat the third option is that you get two dominant orange alleles and you get an orange female cat so you can see it's about three times as likely that you're going to be orange if we're dealing with a male cat with just one X chromosome because it really limits our options this also explains why virtually all Tortoiseshell cats are female the only case in which you're going to have a male tortoiseshell cat is in the case of chromosomal abnormality like in the condition that we call a human's kleinofalter syndrome where there is an X an X and A Y chromosome in that male cat but male cats who developed in the typical way will not be tortoise shells or calicos my fifth fact is that the gene that causes your cat to develop an orange pigment in the fur also predisposes them to a condition called lentigo which can lead to black spots on their lips and their noses and other parts of the body kind of like freckles so lentigo is a condition that causes an increase in the concentration of melanin in certain parts of the skin in and it is not harmful to the cat if you do notice that your orange cat starts developing these little black spots is almost always normal you'll notice the same issue showing up in tortoiseshell and calico cats because they also have that orange Gene my sixth fact about orange cats is that they show more sexual dimorphism than cats of other colors so I've only been able to find information on this from the 80s and 90s so please let me know in the comments if you found any fresher research on it but it does seem that after studying populations of cats researchers have found that the orange ones tend to have more dimorphism between the Sexes and what this means is that the males are larger than males of other colors and the females are smaller than females of other colors which means that there's more of a gap between the body size of males and females when they are orange so it's very interesting finding and it could point to differences in the reproductive strategy of orange cats but we really don't know it's all speculative at this point but that leads me to my last point which is about the orange personality so you've heard it said probably that all orange cats share a single brain cell and that orange cats are really silly um they're very affectionate maybe a little bit dim they have a distinct personality right they've done uh surveys of cat owners consistently they'll report that these orange cats have different personalities and it does seem to be a very pervasive belief about orange cats now is there anything to it as I mentioned in that last point about the uh dimorphism between the Sexes and orange cats it does seem that there may be some differences in the reproductive strategy of orange cats versus others they've also found that orange cats seem to be found more in rural areas than urban areas all of this research is kind of inconclusive we don't really know what to make of it some people have also theorized that the reason why orange cats seem like they're more friendly is because they're so much more likely to be male and there's a common belief that neutered male cats are more friendly and affectionate than females I found one study that looked at 196 different cats and looked at different personality traits and they couldn't find any correlation between personality and gender between these cats and then the last possibility and perhaps the likeliest is just that people treat orange cats differently they raise them differently they've socialized them differently and so they both behave differently and are perhaps perceived differently based on the way that that their humans feel about them in addition to your experiences with orange cats I would love to hear if you are interested in more videos like this should I talk more about cat coat types and colors and patterns and things like this it's a kind of new area and I'm curious about the response so let me know what you think and other than that I'll see you in the next video thanks bye

Channel: Cats

Views: 504,239

Keywords: orange cats, cat breeds, orange cats being dumb, cat coats, cat coat genetics, different cat coats, rare cat coats, cat colors

Id: nlXcoVaT-po

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2023