Читать книгу Cats For Dummies - Gina Spadafori - Страница 27

Considering how little they had to begin with, modern breeders have developed an incredible variety of colors and patterns in today’s pedigreed cats. The Cat Fanciers’ Association lists more than 60 color patterns for the Persian alone.

Not that what they started with wasn’t beautiful — and isn’t beautiful still.

By far, the most common cat color/pattern is the “tiger-striped,” or tabby, markings that you can still see in the wild ancestors of the domestic cat. The name tabby comes from Atabi, a silk imported to England long ago that had a striped pattern similar to that of the domestic tiger cat.

Tabbies come in many colors, such as red (more commonly called “orange,” “ginger,” or “marmalade”), cream, brown, or gray. The tabby pattern is so dominant that, even in solid-colored cats, you can often discern faint tabby markings, especially on the head, legs, and tail.

Smoked, shaded, and shell describe the varying amounts of tipping that appear on each individual hair, with shell being a dash of color at the very tip, shaded a little more tipping, and smoke, at the other extreme, being a coat so heavily tipped that it may look solid, except as the cat moves and the lighter color becomes visible underneath. Fur can also be ticked — that is, banded with color, as in the agouti pattern seen in the Abyssinian, where dark-colored bands alternate with lighter ones on each hair shaft.

Pointed cats are those such as the Siamese, with lighter-colored bodies shading to darker, complementary colors at the points — the face, the ears, the legs, and the tail.

Bicolors are any other color (or pattern, such as tabby) paired with white, and particolors have three or more colors, as is true of calicos (commonly with patches of white, red, and black) or tortoiseshells (with swirled red, cream, and black).

Mixing these color types can have some unpredictable results. The spotted Ocicat, for example, was created as the result of mating a Siamese and an Abyssinian!