Van? White Tabby? Other?

[Draco]

My vet called Cassie a "Van" color.. the shelter called her "White Tabby".. what's more accurate? I am curious! I've always said White Tabby. Might be hard to tell in the photos, but her spots has tabby coloring/stripes in them.

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• Draco
• Jul 8, 2013

This one to show her tail.. full tabby tail

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• Draco
• Jul 8, 2013

 

[StefanZ]

White and tabby perhaps.  I mean, if it is most tabby and a big chunk of  white, its called for tabby and white. Here it is the opposite, it is mostly white.

 

[maewkaew]

The "official" term,  like how it would appear in a show catalog if you were showing this beautiful cat as a Household Pet,  would be    Brown Classic Tabby and White.  

 and it's arranged in a "harlequin pattern". 

No matter how much or how little white,  the cat registries don't reverse the word order and call it "White and Tabby".  (  At least they don't do this in TICA or CFA and I don't think they do that in FIFé or other registries either.  But I think Stefan was just musing on how one might describe it colloquially ,  not in official terms.     Some may use  "with White" instead of "And White".     

I can see why you thought of calling her  "White Tabby"  since she is mostly white but also has some tabby bits.  But since you are wanting accuracy,  that would not  be correct,   because when you say a color in front of "tabby",  that refers to the color of the tabby pattern itself.   Every tabby pattern  has a color that comes from the cat's base color.   In Cassie,  the base color is really Black,  but when a cat with black base color is a Tabby,  the tabby pattern very often makes a lot of the hairs appear brownish.,  so it is traditionally called a "Brown Tabby. " 

Every tabby pattern has not only a color,  but a category of tabby pattern,  based on the shapes made by the darker and lighter hairs in the pattern.  The type of tabby pattern can be hard to tell when there is so little of the tabby pattern to look at -- and it really mostly needs to be on the body,  you can't tell from just the tail or head. .  But fortunately , Cassie did have enough tabby patches  on her body that I was able to see that it looks like her tabby pattern is Classic Tabby . (which despite the name sounding like it might be the most common kind, is actually way less common than Mackerel Tabby  ( the ones with vertical stripes on their sides) .

Actually, white isn't really exactly a color in the same way.  It is the absence of color; White  masks  the other color / pattern.   

When there's white patches you can usually just add "and White"  to the description.   

So  for  a cat that is tabby and white,  it  would be:  " [Color of tabby pattern] | [Type of tabby pattern] |Tabby  | and White"  

  So in this case  Brown Classic Tabby and White. 

Re  patterns of white spotting.  

 When a cat is part white and part colored  ( called "Particolor" cats) , that comes from the White Spotting gene.  a dominant gene  with (very !) variable expression.   I think normally a cat with this much white as Cassie would have inherited it from both parents. 

 More ways to describe the amount and arrangement of the white:    Cassie has a pattern sometimes called a   harlequin pattern .   This is almost like what is called a van pattern but a true van pattern is all white except some color on the head and tail.    A harlequin pattern is like a van pattern but with a few  extra patches of color on the body.    So your vet was almost right.   

There is another word that IS used in the official name.  and that is Bicolor,   which is when a cat has roughly equal amounts of white and a color. 

  And another way to describe  her white spotting is that she has "high grade white spotting"    or even more specifically  "grade 7 white spotting."   A breeder came up with 9 categories / grades of white spotting .  There is a chart online that  gives an idea of the range of possibilities and the 'grades",  though of course not all cats fit the illustrations exactly.  

 

[Draco]

That's quite the descriptive and detailed post! I've certainly learned a lot too! I like that term, Harlequin Pattern