red & black or blue & cream these can be patched or brindledĬalico: American term for a tortoiseshell-and-white cat Tortoiseshell (Tortie): a coat with a mix of two colours e.g. Blue (grey) is a dilute version of black. "Tortoiseshell" also includes "tortoiseshell-and-white" (calico) and "tortoiseshell tabby" (torbie) (with or without white). In this article, "ginger" also includes "ginger-and-white" (red bicolour) and "red tabby" (with or without white). The tabby pattern is also caused by other gene. The white areas of calico cats are caused by different genes and can be ignored. To understand what creates tortoiseshell and calico males, we first have to look at the genes for red and for tortoiseshell. With so many unwanted kittens in the world, please don't do this unless you are involved in a genuine research programme. Many owners of tortoiseshell males like to mate the cat once to see if he is fertile. Even though a male tortie or calico may be sterile, he probably still has the male hormones which make him spray. Next time you see someone advertising a "rare tortie male" on Ebay or Craigslist, you can wonder who is more gullible - the person hoping to make a fortune or the person who pays over-the-odds because they think the cat is going to make them a fortune! Another myth about tortoiseshell male cats is that if an owner takes the cat to be spayed (quite reasonably believing it to be female) and it turns out to be a male which the vet then castrates, the owner is entitled to get the money back from the vet for unnecessarily neutering a cat which is already sterile. The abnormalities that create some tortie males can also lead to auto-immune disease or testicular tumours. As pedigree cats, there may be no colour class for them to enter so however fine they look, so they can only compete in the "Any Other Colour" class. As pets they are just like any other cat. Those that are fertile don't pass on the tortoiseshell colour. One website even said that if you found a tortoiseshell tomcat, you could sell it for a fortune and retire! Despite their rarity, tortoiseshell tomcats are not valuable in money terms. Some breeds may be more prone to genetic gender anomalies than others (this has been noted in dogs, but there is currently no comparable data for cats).Īre tortoiseshell or calico tomcats valuable? You may find tortoiseshell tomcats being advertised for large sums of money. According to Roy Robinson's 'Genetics for Cat Breeders' out of a total of 125 kittens produced by black female x orange male there was 1 tortoiseshell male. Some of these would have been mis-dentified poorly defined classic tabbies, especially where white patches obscure the tabby pattern. Over the years and from region to region, the figures given have ranged from 1-in-1000 to 1-in-many-thousands. In fact there are some pedigrees that have two or three generations of fertile tortoiseshell males. Since then there have been many more studies into tortie tomcats, many of whome were fertile, and this has turned the accepted theory of tortie males being due to chromosomal abnormalities and therefore infertile on its head. The black areas of his coat were due to local mutations of skin cells - much like moles or birthmarks - and he was genetically a red-and-white bicolour. Tissue samples found that her stud cat was a red-and-white bicolor "somatic mosaic". This tortie tomcat only passed on the gene for red and never for black. When this article was originally written (1996), a breeder was investigating her fertile tortoiseshell and white stud cat.
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