Just try to find a card that would look just like Angel. Card manufacturers don’t seem to go for creepy two-colored eyes.
:dubious: kittenblue, do you have stripes?
[Joe McCarthy]Have you ever been a member of the Tabby Conspiracy?[/JM]
Only if you count the stripe of gray hair that appears every four weeks!
Barely educated, utterly half-assed WAG:
Based on genetic and behavioral studies on feral/free-roaming cat populations in Europe ( which I’ve mostly only seen the abstracts for ), it would appear that ( at least in Europe ) orange males are on average larger than non-orange males and more aggressive than non-orange males ( meanwhile orange females are on average smaller than non-orange females ). All orange cats are tabbies by definition ( it’s how the genetics of that particular color combination works ).
Given that, it might be that the anecdotally slight prevalence of orange tabbies in posed commercial photography might be the result of a.) striking color pattern coupled with b.) large size and c.) a slightly higher proportion of more assertive personalities working well as a trainable model.
- Tamerlane
p.s. - Another somewhat unrelated but interesting tidbit about orange cats - apparently ( again, at least in France ) the orange phenotype is more common in lower density rural areas vs. high density urban environments.
In low density areas males are solitary, male territories are discrete and females show much higher “fidelity” rates, with most kittens being sired by a single male. In this arena larger males can outcompete smaller males through sheer muscle ( hence favoring the larger orange phenotype ), but they breed later after achieving full size and getting enough experience to compete - about age three on average.
But in high density urban populations, males and females will gather communally and amicably at feeding sites. While male social hiearchy will often continue to be based on size, the indiscriminate mixing means that access to ( numerous ) females in heat is general and therefore fidelity as such goes out the window. The vast majority of urban females mate with multiple males in a single heat and sire kittens from multiple fathers. In this milieu the ability to seize territory based on muscle becomes unimportant and males can mate virtually as soon as they reach sexual maturity - on average at ten months, well before they will have reached full size ( which for males is usually around 18 months ).
p.p.s. - As to the commonality of tabbies generally - brown mackerel tabby is the ancestral color pattern. Not so unusual it would pop up a lot.
My son has a cat book that is very detailed about every characteristic of cats. One interesting tidbit is that all cats are striped in a tabby design, just sometimes the stripes are the same color. We have a pure black cat whose tabby stripes can be seen in certain bright light.
Black cats are hard to photograph, they often look like blobs with eyes. I have a gray tabby and he is our most photographed cat.
The black cat turns his head away every time I pick up the camera since the day I tried to get a picture of him with red eye. click FLASH click FLASH click FLASH.
My nicest cat (The cat that loves me the most) is a tuxedo cat. She doesn’t even meow. She has more of a “Ruh-aaah-Roooo!” (done musically in a kind of C,A,F in 16th notes) before she runs excitedly towards the person paying attention to her and rolls on the ground in front of them. The phrase ‘gotta love me’ keeps coming to mind.
LOGIC? You brought a scienticfic argument into a conspiracy thread? How dare you!
In certain lights, some black cats can look down right weird. Cite.
