It’s Pumpkin Spice Season!

So this seems like a fine opportunity to talk about orange tabbies. Here at Northwest Spay and Neuter Center, we see 13,000 pets per year. We see more cats than dogs, and we see so many orange tabbies!
Here are some fun facts about these great cats:

Orange tabbies don’t all present in the exact same hue, but will have some variation of a reddish, orange, and/or cream-colored hue. Why? These cats have a predominance of a certain pigment known as pheomelanin—the same pigment that produces red hair in humans

The orange tabby will typically present with 1 of 4 different types of coat patterns.

People who own and love orange tabbies will easily be able to tell the difference between the various coat marking patterns that are common to this type of feline. They include the classic pattern, mackerel pattern, striped pattern, and ticked pattern.

One thing you’ll never see? A tabby with a solid orange coat. For some reason, orange tabbies will always have some sort of pattern in their coat—the mackerel one, in particular, makes them look quite a lot like little tigers! (And for what it’s worth, domestic house cats and tigers share about 96% of their DNA—oh my!)

A quote from Jim Davis (creator of Garfield) comes to mind ~ “In my head, the sky is blue, the grass is green and cats are orange.”
Do you share your heart with an orange tabby?