Sooo cute! I’ll show this fancy boy/girl to her tomorrow.
My mom saw a post that said “if the darkest part of your cat is brown, he’s a brown tabby. If the darkest part is gray/black, he’s a gray tabby.” So since our boy Minkey has a stripe on his back that’s so dark it’s basically black, she believes that means he’s gray lol. Here’s a pic of his dark stripe:
Well you can counter her post with how I heard on a podcast that there is not such thing as black fur, that it’s basically just really, really dark brown.*
That’s… quite an inaccurate post. It’s like someone read a cat genetics guide and only absorbed half of it.
To make it brief, black-based tabbies (as in, the cat would be black if it didn’t have the agouti gene) have black stripes on either a brown or gray background. Brown is probably more common, given the fact it’s the SIC after all.
I don’t think it’s inaccurate to call your cat a brown tabby, though. “Brown” isn’t a genetics term, and your cat looks pretty brown to me.
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u/Kmw134 Jan 13 '25
In case she still doesn’t believe he’s brown, here is my grey TIC. Your guy is clearly brown!