seriously. where are all these masses coming from who think a cat’s coloring affects their personality? what the fuck?
even though we’re also super racist, this at least is not a thing here. it’s never been a thing.
what the fuck.
I have noticed this. It went from “Look at my dumb orange cat failing to jump onto the wardrobe :)” to “He’s orange, ofc he’s a low IQ Untermensch” in real time.
I don’t think it started maliciously, and yet here we are.
yeah, i think it’s just that the only framework they have for understanding the world is racism, so it naturally gets applied to everything
I used to have an orange cat and he was a very smart boy
I used to have an orange cat and he was a lazy little himbo who once got a ladybug stuck on his nose.
Tbf, genes matter a lot more in domesticated animals. We’re not talking about an evolutionary process, in selective breeding we could very well see something like orange fur being associated with lower intellect.
It’s the same reason certain breeds of dogs all end up getting hip dysplasia. It could just mean that the current population was started with just a few orange cats and a lot of inbreeding, which makes sense as it’s a recessive trait.
it’s not just americans, I live outside the anglosphere and I have been informed by the feline skull measurers that my bicolor cat is genetically destined to be temperamental
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
First time I heard the dumb orange cat stereotype was a few years ago, and I just thought wtf. Literally made no sense to me.
its a natural extension of racism for dogs
Yeah, don’t forget that all pitbulls are always aggressive 100% of the time. /s
It always come down to racism/bigotry based on nothing.
come to think of it, anglos have long believed that red haired people have tempers. something like that. so maybe this is just a natural extension of that idiocy.
Anglos think all the stereotypes they grew up seeing in cartoons is total gospel, it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
It’s because it’s become uncouth to just say, “Man, fuck the Irish.”
i think they had this idea even in the 19th century, and it was certainly popular to say “fuck the irish” back then.
Aren’t most calicos females? Aren’t most white cats blind or deaf (don’t remember which)? And aren’t many dog and cat breeds bred to do specific tasks? If such oddities exist then I don’t see why it’s so unbelievable for animals to have different relationships to personality and physical biology than humans. I don’t think people should be trying to apply human sociobiology to animals.
Something like 99% of tortoiseshell cats are female, and other the 1% tend to be intersex and/or sterile. Roughly 80% of orange cats are male. The “clingy but a-little-too-adventurous himbo” traits associated with orange cats are pretty common across male cats, while the “little miss attitude” traits associated with torties (and torbies) are very common among all female cats.
That said, my orange girl absolutely fits the orange cat stereotype. She tries to get on top of doors and is surprised when she can’t. The dog is so afraid of her that he will refuse to go near the stairs if she is on them. I’ve had to pull her out from under the dresser and/or night stand because she got stuck. My wife regularly ends up slimed by Churu splash because this cat will grab her wrist and try to steal the entire Churu pouch during treat time with the other cats.
I have a boy black cat that fits the exact description of your orange girl. We joke about him being an orange that baked a little too long.
yeah, and iirc red cats are mostly males, but the rest is just designer breeds of cats stuff, which is just weird as hell to me. why breed cats? they’re perfect as they are. normal local shorthair cats are all the same on average. which means they come in the same range of personalities of course, i’m not claiming they’re literally all the same.
I’m not saying you’re claiming they’re all the same. I just don’t understand the discourse around animal temperament and human racism when humans have practiced eugenics on animals for status or tasks and fucked up their genetics for eons now
because there’s never been any real intentional breeding done on default cats. if we’ve fucked up their genetics, it wasnt because we bred them, but because we killed very aggressive ones and kept the cute kittens. much of the evolution of cats among humans was done not as pets but as barn cats (or similar roles), where they are a half-tame half-wild animal that fucks whoever it wants.
cat coat color clearly has nothing to do with anything. the wild cats from which domestic cats come from are all basically tabbies, and it’s not like anyone set out to breed cow-spotted black and white cats. all these coats coexist in feral/rural (the line can be hard to draw, with barn cats and such) cat populations and it’s just random variance.
I think it’s mostly harmless though. Like, we say our cats have spicy black cat energy because it’s fun and makes us think of Halloween, but ultimately they are spicy because all cats are spicy.
sure sure, i’m just telling you what this behavior looks like from the outside. according to me. very eminent scholar of these kinds of things, really. honestly.
but seriously, we’ve had cats since i was … 5? and i never ever thought of connecting the coloring of a cat to its personality. ever. this never entered the horizon of things to think for anyone i knew in hungary in the 90s. or the 2000s. i first encountered this sort of thinking on reddit a few years ago. the only thing i can relate it to is the stories of people killing black cats because of witches or whatever.
I guess the language of it comes from the Internet, but for us (mostly my partner) the love of black cats goes back to childhood TV and we ended up rescuing a bonded pair of them. In reality we definitely don’t need to be doing cat phrenology
Agreed, mostly harmless to the animals, but does prove to be a good example of humans incessant need to compete for superiority based on things they don’t control.
