are orange tabby cats mostly male or female

#ARE ORANGE TABBY CATS MOSTLY MALE OR FEMALE PLUS#

You may have noticed that some of the most famous cats are orange, including the comic cat Garfield, Milo from The Adventures of Milo and Otis, and Morris, the 9 Lives cat food cat.

Then again, whether male or female, most orange cats are friendly and well-behaved. If you have a female orange tabby cat, you should consider yourself lucky because there are very few. Whatever the chromosomal case might be, the result is that most orange tabby cats are male. Most Orange Tabby Cats are Male Image Credit: Sam Chang, Unsplash Indeed, for a male to be calico, he would need to be XXY, which is super-rare and unnatural, usually caused by an anomaly in the mother cat when she’s pregnant. Studies have determined that less than one out of every 1,000 kittens is born a male and a calico. For a female to be orange, she would need to have two orange Xs, which is rare enough that less than 20% of orange cats are female.Įxtrapolating this a little further, since all female cats are XX, and X can be either orange or black, an even higher number of calico cats are female than orange tabby cats are male. This circumstance happens over 80% of the time, which is why 80%+ of all orange cats are male. If he has an orange X chromosome, he will be orange. It can’t be both at the same time, however.Ī male cat will always be a combination of the X and Y chromosome. An allele gene can have variants, and the hair color allele on the X chromosome can be either black or orange. The X chromosome carries two genes, known as alleles. In cats, however, the X chromosome also carries the information for hair color. Cats, like all mammals, have other chromosomes as well, and in other mammals, those different chromosomes determine attributes like their hair color, size, shape, and other physical features. If you remember high school biology (which was admittedly difficult for many of us), you likely learned that two chromosomes determine the sex in mammals: the X and the Y chromosome.

#ARE ORANGE TABBY CATS MOSTLY MALE OR FEMALE PLUS#

However, this also means that 20% of orange tabbies are female, which is no small number.Īre you curious as to why most orange tabby cats are male, what causes this, and other facts about why some colors of cats are mostly male and some primarily female? If so, read on! Below, we’ve got the answers to these questions and several more, plus fascinating facts and other tidbits of info. All orange tabby cats are not male, although the vast majority, about 80%, are of the male persuasion. That rumor, however, is not exactly correct.

If you know about cats or are a cat parent, you might have heard rumors that all orange tabby cats are male.

Are orange tabby cats mostly male or female