Are Orange Tabby Cats Always Male? Unlike most ginger tabby cats, orange female cats do exist.
However, they are only a tiny minority 20% and are much rarer than the orange male, who makes up the vast majority of all tabby cats 80%.
This gives the impression that all ginger tabbies are male when this isn’t actually the case.
As with many related traits, the shade of fur color was determined by genetics orange genes were passed down from both parents but remember everything about your cat’s hair color is dependent on their genes entirely.
Are Orange Tabby Cats Always Male
Although it may seem that all orange tabby cats are male, this is not a hard statistic to back up with proof. As a matter of fact, there are a decent amount of ginger tabbies out there who aren’t actually male 20% female to be exact. That is 1/5th of all ginger tabbies and 2/5th if you count the orange ones separately.
Genetics
I am going to try and make this easy to understand by giving you a brief introduction to genetics.
A cat has 38 chromosomes, 18 of which are paired one from the mother, one from the father.
In females, all pairs will consist of two X chromosomes whereas males carry an X chromosome from their mother as well as a Y chromosome from their father. This makes all females XX and males XY.
Packed into the cat’s body are their genes, which determine every aspect of their being, including the color of their fur. Each gene works slightly differently to determine what a cat may look like.
Some are recessive and require two copies of the same gene in order to be expressed. Others are dominant and have an influence on other recessives regardless of whether they have only one copy.
Male Dominant Influence
The reason that a cat is either red or black is due to his or her genetic makeup and the chromosomes the cat inherited.
Melanin decides the final coat color and orange fur results from one gene changing the expression of another, which can change black pigment into orange.
Because a tabby’s color depends upon a linked gene, an orange female must inherit two orange genes whereas a male red cat only needs one.
Since any red color is epistatic, all orange cats are tabbies and solid red show cats are usually a low contrast ticked tabby.
Orange Coat Inheritance
Ginger cats can be born in certain circumstances. That said, it is much more typical for male cats to be ginger than females unless this orange tabby inherits their red coat from their mother.
Red and ginger typically go hand in hand too, which means a father’s coloring isn’t as important when talking about the probability of the kittens turning out to be ginger.
FAQs
Why are orange tabby cats so affectionate?
It’s often believed that cat coats’ colors have a lot to do with their personalities. Certainly, orange tabby cats, are probably considered affectionate because they were taken good care of when they were kittens.
And that certain early socializing with people and other cats is one of the most significant aspects in a cat’s development of its personality.
Final Thoughts
So did you know that not all orange tabby cats are male? It’s true enough; ginger cats – especially males – tend to outnumber female tabbies in the wild, but that shouldn’t be a surprise. Female cats can have as many as six different genes in play when it comes to their fur, and so because of this, one might think that most ginger felines are male simply because they make up the minority of females with inherited O gene variants a genetic trait responsible for orange or reddish fur.