Wait, do people in the US really call them "orange cats" - I just thought that was a reddit / internet thing.
In the UK these are ginger cats.
We call them orange cats (gatos laranjas) in Portuguese too!
Many places outside the US call them orange as well.
I always found this funny as well. We say ginger cats (chats roux) in French too!
Cookie vs biscuit, vacation vs holiday, gasoline vs petrol, etc, etc.
I always called the orange even when I was in the UK.
You might be shocked that we say "red heads" instead of ginger as well.
In the US, "ginger" is a seasoning, not a color. Like, in general; we do not refer to anything as being ginger-colored unless it's a sort of pale yellowish tan.
People will still refer to redheads as "ginger" but only some of the time
In UK English ginger isn't exactly a color either. It's not like yellow or orange. It's a state of being.
I don't know why this is being downvoted. Does "ginger-colored" sound right to you? It doesn't quite work.
It's true. A person is ginger, but nobody ever says things are ginger coloured. Ginger isn't even really one colour - it's a spectrum of orange-containing hair colours.
UK and USA are brotherly nations divided only by their common language.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/ I think it is relevant.
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...
Most likely this is because orange cats are almost always male, and (neutered) male cats tend to be goofier than females.
I think the association with discrimination against red haired humans is a stretch though
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 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.
Can you describe what the male looked like? I have a tortoiseshell who's all crooked. Her paws are twisted inward, her tail is shaped like a spring, her rear legs are longer than her front legs. She's all weird. Now I'm wondering if she has extra stuff like a vertebra too. Does your male cat looked overall normal despite the extra vertebra?
They both looked normal and where quite beautiful cats actually.
We only found out their health issues from exams.
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.
As someone who lives with 4 cats, one of which who is orange and conforming with all stereotypes, I implore you to further that line of inquiry. While the OP paper doesn’t claim behavioral differences are supported, it doesn’t falsify them and there could be a dynamic there. If you could genetically encode shamelessness it might encapsulate the behavior. It’s not a lack of intelligence per se, more of a lack of inhibition.
This paper demonstrates a connection with behavior. I personally suspect gingers have smaller amygdala.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381166835_The_Skin-...
Tangential and sample size n = 1, but the two orange cats in my life were spankers/lovers of cat bongos whereas all other coloured cats were not.
There is something different about them, and the red hair thing is a coincidence.
We have a tuxedo boi who is a big fan of the butt bongos, n=1 again but still.
Hey, some of us love and appreciate that red hair too!
Did you know people with blue eyes are more likely to have bipolar disorder? This of course doesn’t mean everyone blue eyes has bipolar disorder but it makes it more likely. I think the issue may be playing out in orange cats as well. It’s certainly not going to give me every orange is weird, but it increases the likelihood and I think that’s why we see the stereotype play out.
I had an orange cat growing up in the 1970s well before the Internet and out of the seven cast I own as a child. It was very much different.
So in the US, they call them orange cats. In Korea, we call them 'cheese tabbies' or 'cheese nyang(kitten).' Someday, when I leave this place, I'd like to get a cat. I really like the ones with broad faces. But right now, I can barely even take care of myself
60 years of dissecting fluffy orange kittens is a lot of fluffy orange kittens. =(
Good news: Genetic research does not involve direction.
Source: I have had my genome sequence. I was not dissected.
Why would you need to dissect kittens for a gene study?
You would make a terrible Igor
I would make several great Igors.
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.
“ 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?
people are very good at seeing their pets conforming to their expectations, whether that is scientifically true or not :)
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dog-breed-individual-beh...
> Breed offers little predictive value for individuals, explaining just 9% of variation in behavior.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0639
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/which-dog-breed-s... (here note how big the overlap is between breeds for most traits, and clumpiness is rare, but present)
Humans carry this GTPase as well. GTP is energy source of receptors called G protein coupled receptors. They are about 750 these and many of them are catecholamine receptors, like the serotonin and dopamine receptors.
Humans also carry this gene. https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q6ZRI8/entry
In humans, both DNA and RNA are mostly expressed in the brain and in the endocrine system.
https://www.proteinatlas.org/ENSG00000147256-ARHGAP36/tissue
For cats it very well may be different. Genes do not express activity the same indifferent species and they’re definitely not the same in different parts of the body. Genes can express RNA in one part of the body and more DNA and another part.
But I think this deletion is really about how it affects the methylation the gene.
Recently I went through the list of all of the subs that I follow and 80% of them were all cat related.
I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of all subreddits are cat related.
fyi: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd6EjvCDRRWlkHjEYvSfOkA