to me, shes just an orange baby

emnspace13

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Hi all! I made an account specifically for this. People ask me a lot what kind of cat she must be, and my answer is that she is just orange. I would love to know the proper way to explain her traits though! You'll see me post again probably- my mother has two cats she's always been curious about as well. Thank you all in advance! 20211231_104629.jpg
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Caspers Human

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Your "Emily" looks a lot like our neighbor's cat, "Louise." (AKA: "Louie")
Louie comes over to visit our cat, Casper, every once in a while. She'll show up on our back porch and we'll holler, "Casper! Your girlfriend's here!" Casper comes a'running! ;)

BTW: Did you know that female, orange tabbies are rare?
You probably know that calicos have a 99% chance of being female. Right?
It's the same for orange tabbies. According to the rules of genetics, somewhere between 80% and 90% of all orange tabbies are male.

Maybe that's why you get so many people asking about your cat. They aren't used to seeing female cats with this kind of coat.
 

Maurey

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She’s a red mackerel tabby domestic shorthair.


It's the same for orange tabbies. According to the rules of genetics, somewhere between 80% and 90% of all orange tabbies are male.
Not sure where this statistic comes from, and why it comes up so often. Red girls are just as common as black girls. Boys of either colour will be a bit more common purely by virtue of tortie existing, but the difference is nowhere near that large. There aren’t any official stats to my knowledge, but at a guess closer to 40% of red or black cats will be girls. All you need to produce a red girl is a tortie or red mum and a red dad. The same way that all you need for a black girl is a black or tortie mum and a black dad.
 
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Caspers Human

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While it’s true that a higher percentage of orange tabbies are male, the ratio is actually about 80 percent male to 20 percent female. And it’s not some sort of magic — it’s genetics. The X chromosome is responsible for the orange coloring. Females possess two Xs and males possess XY. Hence, a female orange tabby cat requires the sire and the dam to pass on the orange genes. But males only need the orange gene from their mothers.

:)
 

Maurey

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:)
Not a credible source, sadly. Not sure why people keep seeing and spreading that statistic. It just doesn’t add up — there’s absolutely no reason why red girls would be rare in any capacity, as they have the exact same chance as black girls of being born, as they need similar genetic matchups (see my previous post). They also have absolutely no source for that statistic, so I’m guessing they made it up lol. Unless they copied it from some other blog 🤷🏻
 

missymotus

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pretty red girl :)

Not sure why people keep seeing and spreading that statistic.
agree, not everything on the internet is true and then gets spread around (such as one registries basic genetics page with errors 😏)
red girls are not rare or severely outnumbered by boys.
 

Meowmee

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She is a dsh red tabby- looks like mackerel tabby pattern as others have said, beautiful girl😻 Statistically due to genetics there is more chance for a boy to be red than for a girl. You can look this up, just google red color genetics in cats. How many actual red tabby girls there are vs boys I don’t know. I can say in many years of rescue in my area I have not encountered any red girls for whatever reason, they were all boys. She has beautiful eyes 💕
 

Maurey

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Statistically due to genetics there is more chance for a boy to be red than for a girl. You can look this up, just google red color genetics in cats. How many actual red tabby girls there are vs boys I don’t know. I can say in many years of rescue in my area I have not encountered any red girls for whatever reason, they were all boys.
Just because that's been your experience doesn't mean they're unusually rare. Yes, boys will be more common, nobody's denying that, but there's not going to be that much difference between the relative proportion of black and red boys, nor would there be a disproportionate amount of red males as compared to female cats. If we're using anecdotes, a local shelter only has around 8 red cats on their website at the moment, 6 of which are girls, all unrelated adults. Blacks, both solids and tabby, are much more prevalent, and there you can see a roughly 60/40 divide, which would most likely be the same for red with a large enough sample size.
 

Meowmee

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Just because that's been your experience doesn't mean they're unusually rare. Yes, boys will be more common, nobody's denying that, but there's not going to be that much difference between the relative proportion of black and red boys, nor would there be a disproportionate amount of red males as compared to female cats. If we're using anecdotes, a local shelter only has around 8 red cats on their website at the moment, 6 of which are girls, all unrelated adults. Blacks, both solids and tabby, are much more prevalent, and there you can see a roughly 60/40 divide, which would most likely be the same for red with a large enough sample size.
Agree, I didnt mean to say they are rare, I am just mentioning it but it is obviously not a scientific study. If the true percentages for red boy vs girl are 60/40 or even 80/20 as most websites seem to quote I would not think that would make it extremely rare considering how many cats there are.

It is odd if those are the percentages that I saw no red girls still, maybe it is my area or other factors. I have not done a high volume of rescue but I have cared for many cats, volunteered, done tnr over a long period etc. so I have seen enough for a statistics to have an effect I would think.

I don’t know what the overall percentages of red cats are male and female vs other colors. A few years ago I was helping TNR a small colony at someone’s house in my neighborhood. There were a lot of red cats / kittens- all male, and some calicos etc. in the colony- female cats were calico, tabby, torbie, gray, some others, no black maybe. I think there were some gray and white, white and maybe no tortoiseshells. I am not that up on the genetics to figure it all out and there was no way to know who was mating with who, or even how many cats there were, prolly about 50 maybe. There could have been outside males as well.
 

vince

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That's funny. The pair of neighborhood ferals (orange male/tortie female) that produced my orange female had three litters that I know of, and at least one of every litter was an orange female.
 

Caspers Human

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pretty red girl :)

agree, not everything on the internet is true and then gets spread around (such as one registries basic genetics page with errors 😏)
red girls are not rare or severely outnumbered by boys.

Better?


A comprehensive genetic linkage map of the domestic cat X chromosome was generated with the goal of localizing the genomic position of the classic X-linked orange (O) locus. Microsatellite markers with an average spacing of 3 Mb were selected from sequence traces of the cat 1.9× whole genome sequence (WGS), including the pseudoautosomal region 1 (PAR1). Extreme variation in recombination rates (centimorgans per megabase) was observed along the X chromosome, ranging from a virtual absence of recombination events in a region estimated to be >30 Mb to recombination frequencies of 15.7 cM/Mb in a segment estimated to be <0.3 Mb. This detailed linkage map was applied to position the X-linked orange gene, placing this locus on the q arm of the X chromosome, as opposed to a previously reported location on the p arm. Fine mapping placed the locus between markers at positions 106 and 116.8 Mb in the current 1.9×-coverage sequence assembly of the cat genome. Haplotype analysis revealed potential recombination events that could reduce the size of the candidate region to 3.5 Mb and suggested multiple origins for the orange phenotype in the domestic cat. Furthermore, epistasis of orange over nonagouti was demonstrated at the genetic level.
 

Maurey

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Better?

I don’t see how this is relevant to the claim that 80-90% of red cats are male. This just explores the details of how the sex-linked O | o locus works. Some interesting references and details here, especially in regards to the origin of the O gene, but doesn’t explore prevalence at all.
 
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