Why are gray cats called blue?

Gray cats are called ‘blue’ because the grey coat has a faint blue tint. This is because the grey coated cat is genetically a dilute black coat; the effect of the presence of the dilution gene. This partly explains why cat breeders and the cat associations i.e., the cat fancy refers to grey cats as blue cats. It is misleading to people outside the cat fancy because these are truly speaking grey cats as a dilute black is going to be grey if we ignore the very slight blue tint. Dr. Desmond Morris in his book Cat World describes this description as “a harmless conspiracy of mutual deception”. He goes on to write that “all cat breeders refer to their conspicuously pure grey cats as blue”. He says that it is a convention (which it is) and it is one that is rarely broken.

He carried out a mini survey checking through the index of books that described the various cat breeds and in all “blue” was mentioned 86 times whereas “grey” was mentioned zero times!

Clearly, the cat fancy has totally ostracised the idea that their cats can be grey, and I think it is because grey to many people signifies dullness and averageness and they want their cats to be outstanding and sparkling.

Note: I have used both the American spelling of ‘grey’ and the English version ‘gray’.

: Russian Blue: Photo: copyright Helmi Flick

The Russian Blue cat breed is gray but the breeder who created the breed decided to use the word ‘blue’ rather than ‘gray’ because cat breeders prefer blue to gray. Why? Because it sounds more interesting and technical. They could have called the breed ‘the Russian Gray’.

J.D. Salinger’s Russian Blue Cats

You’ll see some blue (gray) British Shorthairs from Russia looking almost blue! Weird (see below). How do they achieve that? Judicious use of vegetable die 😉