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Tortoiseshell cat question
GiraffeGirl
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I remember reading once, a very long time ago, that the majority of torties are female. I can't remember where - it was potentially a very disreputable source!
Anyway, I remembered this when I was watching TV earlier and the Whiskas advert with the "I love grilled chicken, and my cat Lucy, and she loves grilled chicken too!" woman on it. And she said that Lucy had brought her friend, a tortoiseshell cat called Alfie, to eat.
(I'll ignore the fact she's feeding someone else's pet really expensive cat food which I'd get irritated by!)
So - owners or past owners of torties - are they usually female or was the source I read it from a big fat liar?
Anyway, I remembered this when I was watching TV earlier and the Whiskas advert with the "I love grilled chicken, and my cat Lucy, and she loves grilled chicken too!" woman on it. And she said that Lucy had brought her friend, a tortoiseshell cat called Alfie, to eat.
(I'll ignore the fact she's feeding someone else's pet really expensive cat food which I'd get irritated by!)
So - owners or past owners of torties - are they usually female or was the source I read it from a big fat liar?
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Yes - I'd heard that too .
Interesting article here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6092954/Male-tortoiseshell-cat-genetically-impossible.html
When I rang the vets up to make an appointment to get her checked out (at that point I didnt know if she was a girl or a boy) the vet nurse said "oh if its a tortie its bound to be a girl"...which she was!
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=1207914&page=21
Where Spiderpig tells us about his Tortie Alfie. I am assuming that Alfie is a boy?!
I thought that too when I saw this advert. Perhaps the cat is female, but her name is actually Alfrieda:D
But as the article says, it is possible for a male tortie.
:eek: Whiskas nicked Spiderpig's cat's name, or even Spiderpig's cat! :eek:
or a ginger female
i don't have my notes to hand but IIRC when you do get a male tort, or a female ginger they tend to have trisomy of the sex chromosomes
The handful of male tortoiseshells that exist are either 'mosaics' (when two embryos fuse to make one cat with two cats' genes) or males which have inherited an extra X chromosome due to a genetic accident (so they are XXY instead of the normal XY - such males are almost certainly infertile).
With ginger cats, the 'ginger gene' is recessive and carried on the X chromosome, which means that if a male cat, with only one X chromosome, inherits a ginger gene from either parent he will be ginger, but a female needs to inherit a ginger gene from both parents (so she has it on both of her X chromosomes) in order to be ginger. If she only inherits one ginger gene she'll be a tortie. So there are a lot more male gingers than females, but female gingers are much commoner than male torties.
Sounds lovely
I'm not sure how the silvering gene works, but I believe it is expressed independently of whichever combination of the ginger/black genes the cat has.
From a red/ginger father and tortie mother you'd expect half the female kittens to be ginger (ginger gene from both parents) and the other half tortoiseshell (ginger gene from father only).
I met two beautiful ginger female farm cats at a friend's place the other day.
My vet says torties usually have a fiery temperament - which was proved a moment later when my tortie scratched her!
I agree totaly. Torties are barmy. 2 of them run around all over the place and one constanley wants to ring toys too me all the time. Plastic bottle lids toy mice etc. There completley bonkers. Sorry i cant spell tonight i have been to the pub which is so unusal for me
Almost correct, but ginger is not recessive. If it was a tortie cat wouldn't exist - a female would have to have ginger on both X chromosones for it to be expressed, and she would be ginger not tortie.
But absolutely right about tortie males being mosaics or XXY males.
You can also plot mating outcomes:
And if you are interested, you can use o or O for X as a shorthand in the genotypes, so males are OY (ginger) or oY (not ginger) and females are OO (ginger), Oo (tortie) or oo (not ginger). That's where the mating outcomes come from - perm all cominations of OO, Oo or oo and OY or oY.
What is really interesting is what happens when a tortie cat has white spots - instead of finely mingled ginger and whatever else, the cat has large patches or them - it's a calico. I gather this is to do with X-inactivation and the Wikipedia explains it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortoiseshell_cat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation
And of course the 'whatever else' can be anything - tabby, plain, black, blue, chocolate and so on - and the cat can also have a Burmese, Tonkinese or Siamese colour restriction.
Sorry but not true. Several breeds are all grey (aka "blue"), that is all cats in that breed, all the males and all the females are blue e.g British blues, Russian blues, Korat cats, Chartreaux (sp)etc, also blue pointed cats can be male or female
I thought that afterwards. We had a grey kitten just before we got Winnie. The grey kitten died (we believed the man when he told us that she was 8 weeks old and ready to leave, she was so much younger, didn't realise that at the time, clear that he couldn't wait to get rid of the kittens before they were ready to go. we did all we could to keep her strength up, but it didn't work ) So when we heard about these other grey kittens my mum was talking to nan and she said all grey kittens were female. Obviously not true, though she didn't realise that.