3 Dogs and 2 Cats

A tabby cat is a cat with a distinctive coat that features stripes, dots, or swirling patterns. Tabbies are often mistakenly assumed to be a breed of cat, it’s a color. In fact, the tabby pattern is a naturally occurring feature that may be the original coloration of the domestic cat’s distant ancestors. Tabby color is found in many cat breeds, as well as among the general ‘moggy’ (mixed-breed or mongrel) population. When cats are allowed to breed randomly, the coloration of the population tends toward brown mackerel tabbies with green eyes, leading geneticists to believe that this is the common wild phenotype of the domestic cat. The tabby cat usually is gray and has an “M” mark on its fore head. But sometimes Tabis can be orange. For instance it could be orange and have blue eyes, or tanish orange and have green eyes.

There are four tabby patterns that have been shown to be genetically distinct: mackerel, classic, spotted and ticked. A fifth includes tabby as part of another basic color pattern, the “patched” tabby, which may be a calico or tortoiseshell cat with tabby patches (the latter is called a “torbie”. A number of other variations are due to the interaction between domestic cats and wildcat genes in cat breeds such as the Bengal and can now be seen in Bombay .