I’ve heard that white cats tend to be deaf, and if a white cat has one blue eye and one green eye it will be deaf in one ear. What’s the Straight Dope on this?
I’m sorry, what?
j/k
I have a white cat. She’s not deaf. Thats about as helpful as I can be on the subject.
Thanx 
It’s white cats that also have blue eyes that have a higher rate of deafness, though they might have perfect hearing, and other cats can still have hearing problems.
Google brings up a lot of hits, this one seems to cover the OP pretty well:
http://www.messybeast.com/whitecat.htm
Our odd-eyed white cat hears just fine, and appears to have a “Siamese blue” left eye. She also inherited the Siamese voice and build, but not the Siamese brains.
Our white cat (in the back yard these days… 
) had one blue and one orange eye and she heard fine. Didn’t ever do any tests to see if she was deaf in one ear.
A random cat book at the book store many years ago told the story that blue eyed white cats were usually deaf, while orange eyed were not, so some folks decided to try breeding away the deafness and managed to produce a lot of odd-eyed cats in the process.
There is (believed to be) a gene cluster that includes a recessive gene that causes malformation of some part of the inner ear (thus causing deafness), which is associated with one of the fur-color genes and the eye-color gene – i.e., they’re on the same end of the same chromosome.
This means that there is a higher-than-chance correlation between blue eyes, white fur, and deafness – but not that any one element will result in the other.
(Note that this is an American shorthair gene grouping – we had a blue-eyed white cat that was 3/4 American shorthair and 1/4 Siamese, and absolutely no indication of deafness in her or the four white kittens she had over a couple of litters. In fact, if anything, their hearing was sharper than average.)
Ignoramuses. Eugenics is not the answer for deafness. Cochlear implantation technology is improving every day. Bilateral cochlear implants can assure that your cat will lead a full and productive life.
Yes, but will he be able to solve crimes using only forensic evidence?
Well, I’m not sure, but my wife has a cochlear implant and she just loves CSI. She’s a respiratory therapist too, so she explains all the gory stuff to me. 
Well, I can speak from experience that the two white haired blue eyed cats we had when i was a kid were both as deaf as deaf could be.
Dumber’n a box of hammers, too.
I used to date a woman who had a white cat that was deaf. She claimed that it did tend to be a trait of white cats. IANACE though.
I used to have a white cat who was deaf. She had green eyes, and was very fat.
My little all white buddy has green eyes and hears fine. I found him in a warehouse. A white haired blue-eyed cate he was in there with was obvioiusly deaf and I was never able to catch him/her. You could make all kinds of noise as you tried to approach it but it would run as you got close, I assume it felt the footsteps.
Speaking of cat oddities, I was also told that most calicos are female and *most * orange tabbys are male. Weird.
That’s true. Calicos and tortoiseshells are almost always female and if a one is a male, he is sterile. All-orange tabbys (fully striped; not half orange stripes and half white) are almost always male. Orange and white cats are usually male, but can be female.
I don’t know about orange tabbies, but the female/calico connection isn’t really weird at all. The genes for orange and black are located on the X chromosome. Each cell in a female cat will have two X’s, but one X will be inactivated. The inactivation is random, so some cells will have active orange genes that make orange hair, and some will have active black genes. Cats that get an X with an orange gene and an X with a black gene will have both black hair and orange hair. Male calico cats have two X chromosomes too. They are XXY.
After what Omega Glory it doesn’t seem so weird. I never knew that male calicos were sterile.
Here’s another oddity. My mother has a male cat, it’s part Maine Coon and part Tabby. He has an extra foot coming off each front foot. All his toes are tipped in white. A friend told her that he must be a decendent of the cats Earnest Hemmingway bred. Apparently he bred Maine Coons with extra feet. Anyone care to shed light on this or debunk it? I never found any info on this.
I’ve got a white longhair with blue eyes who’s deaf. Either that or she’s really, really good at ignoring me and is merely pretending to be startled when I manage to sneak up on her.
You mean extra toes, not extra FEET, right? I don’t know the breed of Hemingway’s cats, but he did have a fairly large number of six-toed cats, and from what I understand the decendants of those cats still have the run of his property.