Why is it that there are cats in just about every colour and pattern there is, except for brown? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cat that was brown all over. Why?
Is it possible to breed the rounder, stouter kind of cat with that same kind of coat?
I own a brown cat! She’s not the same shade of brown all over, though. She is lighter on her body and darker on her face and tail (like a siamese).
Basically like this:
Except a much stockier body type.
But you’re right solid brown is pretty rare - tabbys are more common than solid colours anyway, and I think brown may be recessive (cat colour genetics are complicated).
Edited: In response to the above, my cat is stockier (despite her siamese patterning) because she’s a cross (Birman and Burmese). You could probably breed a stockier cat with the right colouration, but breeding a specific phenotype is involved (particularly if you want a stable trait across generations).
We used to have an ostensibly black cat, some kind of tabby. On close inspection, in the right light, he was actually very dark brown, with some variation in hue over his various parts.
I had a tuxedo cat and when she’s sit in a sunbeam you can see her black hair was VERY dark brown, not black. Maybe this has something to do with it
A friend of mine had a brown cat, who recently died. Uniformly dark brown all over, definitely not black.
My friend has two Abyssinian cats that are brown.
There’s a brown cat that lives next door to me. Not a very attractive colouration, I must admit, at least not on… him. Or her. Or whatever it is.
I suppose what we’re finding is that most brown cats tend to be a specific breed (not your general 'domestic short-hair).
What I gathered from this: Cat coat genetics - Wikipedia
Is that:
- a solid colour requires the absence of the dominant tabby gene
- the dominant form of the browning gene is the one that results in a black (or extremely dark brown) coat
Both of these are going to make solid brown cats more unusual.
This is the key. I believe ALL black cats would look brownish in a sunbeam. Quoting: Technically, the black is an almost-black, super-dark brown that is virtually black; true black is theoretically impossible, but often reached in the practical sense (so much for theory).
“Black” is dominant to dark brown which is dominant to light brown. A further potential browning agent is the dilution gene, which could modify the above. One thing I love about cat coat genetics is there are often multiple ways to get to the same endpoint.
Interesting theory indeed. When you’re looking at a brown this dark, I don’t feel bad calling it black, personally.
Brown tabbies are common. Tabby cats are more common than solid-colored cats in general.
Yes. Solid chocolate brown is one of the coat colors of Persian cats (PDF). Persians are an extreme example of the rounder, stockier body type, usually called cobby in cat breed standards.
Exactly - this is Stokie, and in that particular light you can see that he’s indeed very dark brown. Normally he just looks black. (Well, with his sockpaws and his dapper little shirt and… open fly, I guess. You can’t see his tuxedo pattern in that picture, is what I mean.)
I’ve got a longhair brown tabby. She must not be the only one, because we had someone stop at our house one day insisting it was her cat. I also once saw one squashed on the road that I thought was ours for a minute. (They used to be indoor/outdoor cats.)
I don’t have any pix tho, sorry.
Unlike the “Swiss” nomenclature, the “Havana” name is certainly not a reference to geographical origin:
So you’ve got a brown cat breed recently originating in Britain and named “Havana” for its tobacco-brown color (either directly, or in imitation of an existing rabbit breed with the same tobacco-brown color), but also known by the name of an earlier brown cat breed associated with Switzerland.
My cat is brown, black and white.
ETA: Ohhh, brown all over, nvm.