My experience (cat owner myself, son of cat owners and regular cat-sitter) confirms what the article says: orange cats are no more or less prone to doing seemingly stupid/weird things than cats of any other color. More seriously, I think this stereotype is a direct continuation of stereotypes against red-haired humans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_...), so it shouldn't be encouraged...
I had couple of cats (orange male and tortoiseshell female) that lived 20 years after I picked them off the street. The female had only one kidney and the male had an extra vertebra but these things only became a problem in their last year.
They were both very calm creatures. The male was one of the most gentle cats I've ever known. I really miss him greeting me by nodding at me from the sofa when I got home.
Tell that to my female Standard Issue Cats lol. One is food motivated, pretty intelligent when it comes to food and pretty fat, and her twin sister is routinely making me wonder if she's an orange cat with a modified fur. Dumb as rocks but excessively cute.
I was just thinking how behavioral differences of red haired foxes, cats, and humans from their closest relatives are explained by the same sort of proopiomelanocortin and other substantia nigra differences from weak MC1R activity.
“ Arhgap36 is known to cause developmental problems in other animals when it is over- or under-functioning. But it seems that in orange cats, the gene is overexpressed only in developing and mature pigment cells called melanocytes.”
This doesn’t make sense… if thousands of anecdotal reports in cats specifically report otherwise? And if it’s known to not be limited to melanocytes in other mammalian species?
They finally proved that the brain cells of all orange cats are a single brain cell in a quantum state of superposition between all of them? Erwin Schrödinger would be proud.
In the UK these are ginger cats.
They were both very calm creatures. The male was one of the most gentle cats I've ever known. I really miss him greeting me by nodding at me from the sofa when I got home.
I think the association with discrimination against red haired humans is a stretch though
There is something different about them, and the red hair thing is a coincidence.
This doesn’t make sense… if thousands of anecdotal reports in cats specifically report otherwise? And if it’s known to not be limited to melanocytes in other mammalian species?