I went poking around online today, looking for evidence to support the claim I made to Olof that orange cats are rarely female. I found support aplenty, and also this interesting tidbit: as uncommon as orange female cats are, long-haired orange females are even less often seen. Only one in a hundred orange cats is a long-haired female. And not only that, but they’ve apparently got a bit of the devil in them.
From this site:
There is an ancient Egyptian myth that is relevant. It goes like this:
Heroic humans set out to slay a dragon that was the source of all chaos in the world. The dragon was known as A-Pop. When the humans cornered him and struck a killing blow. A-Pop did not die, but flew into a million fragments. The pieces of A-Pop remain suspended, one fragment reappearing in each long-haired, orange female cat.
Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.
It’s so odd that you researched this now, because very recently we’ve done the exact same thing, as I like ginger cats, and we were going to get two males, but my dad suggested girls, as they’re usually more affectionate, don’t spray so much (although we would get them neutered, this can still happen). Anyway, I had a feeling they were quite rare, so was researching online. I didn’t find this story, but lots in Swedish about genetics and lots of scientific diagrams 🙂 That’s 2 coincidences now, hehe.
Yup, because the gene for long hair is recessive, and the red gene is on the x chromosome, which means that male cats only need one of them (since they have xy) to be red, whereas females need the red gene on both x chromosomes to turn out red. If they only have one of them, they turn out torties (or calicos, if they also have the gene for white patches).
I did way too much cat genetics in my teens. Some of it still sticks.