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Yes, but it's because 70% of orange cats are male and male cats tend to be more impulsive. It's a correlation rather than a causation.

https://youtu.be/wPVBGE6uUS4



Genetics says that this is also true for black cats (that most black cats are male).

However, less is said about them and there's less meme / awareness about female black cats being less common.

I suspect this is that an intact male orange cat is much more noticeably male than an intact male black cat.


most black cats are male

Huh, I had not heard that. In my experience it's pretty evenly split -- at least, in my circle of friends and family there's eight black cats, four of each. (Most short-haired, one long-haired black cat that's female.)


Cat coat color is an X linked gene, so there's no representation of it on the Y chromosome.

Let's denote this as Xo and Xb for the genes. An orange female cat is XoXo, a tortoise shell / calico cat is XoXb and a black female cat is XbXb.

Male cats are either XbY or XoY - there are no tortoise shell male cats (there are cats with Klinefelter's syndrome that can be XbXoY but only mentioning this for a full coverage of the topic - and for a real example of this https://disneylandcats.com/cat-profile-francisco/ and it confuses things since XbXbY and XoXoY cats would be difficult to identify without a genetic test).

The thing with all of this is that the genetics for XoXo or XbXb and XoY or XbY are exactly the same percentages.

Doing the Punnett squares for cat coats and all the possible pairings and you get simplified

    Genotype Count Percent of XX or XY
    XoXo     3     25%
    XoXb     6     50%
    XbXb     3     25%
    XoY      6     50%
    XbY      6     50%
It ends up with 2/3 of the orange cats being male and 2/3 of the black cats being male. This doesn't quite match real world situations since you could have a colony that is dominated by orange cats (or black cats ... or neither).


Also noting that you can occassionally get a "tortiose shell" esque male cat via a pretty rare process known as chimerism. i.e. two or more different embryos merge in the womb resulting in different parts of the body being formed from different embryos (meaning different DNA depending what part of the body you sample from). And of course for this to result in a cat you can see, they have to get lucky enough that the combination of embryos still produces a viable fetus.


Messybeast ( http://messybeast.com and more specifically http://messybeast.com/catarchive.htm and http://messybeast.com/genetics-index.htm ... and much much more) is the site I've found for cat coat genetics.

http://messybeast.com/mosaicism6.htm


Not to take anything away from the info you've provided since it is all interesting. But it seems francisco's gender is pretty debated. There are a few that talk about them being a female with certainty, but without any reasoning I also take their info with a grain of salt.


Here are some other examples - http://messybeast.com/mosaicism3.htm

Francisco is the example I picked since he's likely the most well known of tortoiseshell (supposedly) male cats.

I suspect that some of the claims that he's female is based on a lack of knowledge of Klinefelter's syndrome.


But that doesn't necessarily mean they are less intelligent


Stupid is as stupid does




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