(a bad photo, but good display of the cat's coloring)
For those sticklers for statistics amongst my readers, that 1 in 3,000 male calico cat happens to have an extra sex chromosome (XXY). And only 1 in 10,000 of them are fertile, if that many.
Another fascinating feline fact is that all-red (orange) female cats are pretty rare, too. The red allele is recessive, so those girls need two red Xs, so to speak, to carry the color. Not tremendously rare, but not common.
Anyway, from statistics back to specifics. I had thought, before reading up on the subject tonight, that the all-female coloration rule only applied to "tortoiseshell" cats -- those murky, dark blend of colors that have no or very little white (as in this photo from the marvelous website forwarded to me by PeaceableKate, What Color Is My Cat?). It turns out, those are just cats without much white on them -- a "calico" is just the common name for a "Black Tortoiseshell with White", which in itself is a shorthand term for "Black with Red with White". (Calico is a US term, too, not used in the UK. I don't know about elsewhere.)
Our own pretty example has such a low and persuasive growl, and is built rather like a feline bulldog. And I've only owned male cats until Tasha turned up, so my default is male. And, if there are indeed 19,999 stray cats in Portland, there could be as many as 7 male calicos wandering about (were all those strays calicos). But I just checked (an unappreciated interruption in the pre-midnight nap), and we've got a girl. (Disturbingly, I couldn't find any spaying scars, either, so we may have more than one girl if we're not careful.)
Last but not least, I also learned tonight that calicos are considered "Lucky Cats", a.k.a. "Money Cats" -- said to bring safety to sailors and wealth to everybody else. I'd be fine with that.
6 comments:
She has very pretty markings and looks very sweet--like our dear lamented Natasha and the Bride's Ninja. In other words, Fred is an exemplar cat! Her whole story seems quite magical.
I also want to take a moment to commend your cat photography; You take such wonderful cat portraits.
...and I think kittens would be fun, actually.
Maybe Freya?
Ooh, I like Freya, too. Fred has stuck (although Boy-child is pushing for Rembrandt, from a book he read recently). Girl-Child from the start wanted Fredness (or Fredniss?).
But every cat needs a multitude of names, so none of these are out.
I think kittens would be fun, too. But if they aren't already started, it's just irresponsible to have more, in this city.
It makes finding her humans, or definitively not finding them, a little more urgent is all. Signs (with little S's sketched in front of the He's) will go up this afternoon.
What about Freda, or Freida?
Yeah, Frieda is under consideration, too.
The family preference appears to be Fredness, actually, although Girl-Child is trying to make it more feminine by insisting on Frednessa, which even she has troubles pronouncing (she wants to put the accent on the final A, so it's kind of Fred/ness/ahhh).
Today, for unknown reasons, I've called her both "Lilah" and "Sela" without thinking, the way I call Boy-Child "Girl-Child" sometimes and vice versa. I don't know where those names came from, except that I have been remembering a cat of HomoDommi's in the 80's, who was a calico Maine Coon derivative, named Lil. Diamond Lil, although she was rarely called that to her face. Beautiful creature, she was.
Diamond Lil? Was/is that Jammer's sister?
Yep, Jammer's sister. They were to be named, with their half-brother, after river boat gamblers: Black Bart, Diamond Lil, and Gentleman Jim. But then Bart died, and the remaining two were so clearly the cartoon cat twins, so we floated the names Katzen and Jammer upon them. As you can infer, Katzen didn't stick, and Jammer did.
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