A good friend has a birthday coming up. I decided to get her a bit of mass produced mirth to send in the mail.
Since this friend has cats, and I’m partial to critters in general, I was drawn to birthday cards with felines on them. There were cartoon cats for varying infamy, pictures of cats that had creepy photo shopped eyes, and there were just regular cats. As I perused thru these cards, I noticed a trend: orange tabby, orange tabby, grey tabby, another orange tabby. . . All the cats were tabbies! No solid colors, no Siamese, no calico, no every-damned-color-and-few-new-ones (I worked for a Humane Society, these cats do exist).
At first, I was puzzled. Do tabbies photograph better? Are they easier to find or train? Then the dark, sinister part of me spoke up. “Don’t you see,” it said. “These are made a huge companies with their eyes on the bottom line. Cats with just one color would be boring and unappealing. To many colors would scare them. A calico looks disorganized and out of control! A tabby has nice, regular stripes in colors that please the eye. CEO’s wear pin-stripped suits! Read between the lines!”
“Could this be true?” I thought. (Well, actually, my first thought was “Ah, fuck. Gotta change meds again.” But I digress.) Then I thought about all the cats I’ve seen on TV and film – lots of tabbies, especially orange ones! Also, I live with one of these tangerine conformists! Have I been compromised? :eek:
Maybe it’s not limited to the cats. Some Hollywood stars are looking kind of orange as well. Is it a bad tan, or an effort by the Powerful Illuminati to make being citrus-colored acceptable?
Rise up Dopers! Fight the Red-Yellow tide! Our battle cry shall be “AGOUTI!”
Weird…I was just commenting on a similar, personal situation. I have four cats. One is a flame point Siamese, one is solid black, one is a grey tabby, and one is a tortoiseshell. Guess which cat I have the most pictures of? Yep, the tabby. She’s not the cat I’ve had the longest, so that’s not the reason either. She likes to pose the most (plus, she was one of the two cats I got post-digital camera era, natch, more pictures of her kittenhood).
Maybe they’re more dramatic? I have an orange tabby and believe me, he’s a drama queen if I’ve ever seen one. My other cats are all stupid and happy and he wanders the halls whining, “Meh. Meh.” I also notice that of our four cats, he’s the one who gets the most compliments on cuteness.
I just gave my husband 4 birthday cards with cats’ pictures on them. One was a kitten-like tabby, just like my AG, another was a sleek tabby, just like Ishtar; another was black, just like Shaku; another was calico (from me) just because I love calicos and we don’t have one.
While I was looking for these cards, I saw a lovely card with a blue point siamese, and another one with a Russian blue.
Maybe your card shop was just out of the others, MM.
I think they’re the most common coat pattern, for one. They’re also not so…uh…temperamental as Siamese and Burmese for photo shoots, and they are just pretty because they tend to be more symmetrical. A standard splotchy calico is cute and all, but not as pretty as a more symmetrically decorated calico tabby
