You’ve probably never seen a domestic cat coat like this before. The coat is bicolour meaning two colours: white and dark brown in this instance. The coats are sometimes referred to as ‘solid-and-white’. This coat is very strange because of the dark stripe running down the length of the spine. The markings on the forehead are reminiscent of the Turkish Van inverted V marking. There are dark patches behind the ear flaps (pinnae). This is reminiscent of the tabby cat.
The first question is whether the photos are genuine. Sarah Hartwell (messybeast.com) believes that the cat is neither dyed this pattern nor is the photo edited. It’s genuine she believes. In which case this is a very unusual and rare cat. Note: sometimes people do dye their cats. Remember the painted cats? They were amazing but they were not painted or dyed. They were photo-edited very cleaverly. Click here if you’d like to see some.
The photos of this strange cat went viral on social media in Feb 2021. Sarah is a cat genetics wizard but she’s unsure of the finer points of the genetics behind this cat except to say that it is probably caused by the piebald gene or white spotting gene as all bicolour cats are.
She writes that the face has some ‘ticking’ indicating that it is a tabby pattern. There are bicolor tabbies but this cat looks like a standard bicolour except for the amazing coat. The experts grade bicolor cats by the amount of white fur. Cats with very small amounts of white are graded 1 and cats with lots of white are graded 9. I suspect that this cat would be graded around 7-8.
She believes that it might be a primitive pattern seen on some mammals. It appears to be very similar to a cat depicted in an ancient painting from Thailand (see above) which is why she has called it a ‘Thai pattern’.
The cat is not purebred to the best of my knowledge. She certainly does on look purebred. She is a moggy but a bloody rare, perhaps unique, moggy.
Some peole ask ‘Cat cats be piebald’? The answer is yes. Perhaps they think piebald only applies to horses. It does not.
SOME MORE ON BICOLOR CATS:
