Yet another Hacker News

Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search

45 points bookofjoe 1 day ago 16 comments

thesebas 1 hour ago | parent

https://www.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/ I think it is relevant.

rob74 52 minutes ago | parent

My experience (cat owner myself, son of cat owners and regular cat-sitter) confirms what the article says: orange cats are no more or less prone to doing seemingly stupid/weird things than cats of any other color. More seriously, I think this stereotype is a direct continuation of stereotypes against red-haired humans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_...), so it shouldn't be encouraged...

xattt 35 minutes ago | parent

Tangential and sample size n = 1, but the two orange cats in my life were spankers/lovers of cat bongos whereas all other coloured cats were not.

There is something different about them, and the red hair thing is a coincidence.

Cthulhu_ 24 minutes ago | parent

We have a tuxedo boi who is a big fan of the butt bongos, n=1 again but still.

adzm 31 minutes ago | parent

Most likely this is because orange cats are almost always male, and (neutered) male cats tend to be goofier than females.

I think the association with discrimination against red haired humans is a stretch though

mschuster91 19 minutes ago | parent

Tell that to my female Standard Issue Cats lol. One is food motivated, pretty intelligent when it comes to food and pretty fat, and her twin sister is routinely making me wonder if she's an orange cat with a modified fur. Dumb as rocks but excessively cute.

Oarch 24 minutes ago | parent

Hey, some of us love and appreciate that red hair too!

khelavastr 15 minutes ago | parent

I was just thinking how behavioral differences of red haired foxes, cats, and humans from their closest relatives are explained by the same sort of proopiomelanocortin and other substantia nigra differences from weak MC1R activity.

forinti 6 minutes ago | parent

I had couple of cats (orange male and tortoiseshell female) that lived 20 years after I picked them off the street. The female had only one kidney and the male had an extra vertebra but these things only became a problem in their last year.

They were both very calm creatures. The male was one of the most gentle cats I've ever known. I really miss him greeting me by nodding at me from the sofa when I got home.

ourmandave 54 minutes ago | parent

60 years of dissecting fluffy orange kittens is a lot of fluffy orange kittens. =(

shiandow 22 minutes ago | parent

Why would you need to dissect kittens for a gene study?

bitwize 14 minutes ago | parent

They finally proved that the brain cells of all orange cats are a single brain cell in a quantum state of superposition between all of them? Erwin Schrödinger would be proud.

stuaxo 8 minutes ago | parent

Wait, do people in the US really call them "orange cats" - I just thought that was a reddit / internet thing.

In the UK these are ginger cats.

orphea 2 minutes ago | parent

Many places outside the US call them orange as well.

drooopy 2 minutes ago | parent

Cookie vs biscuit, vacation vs holiday, gasoline vs petrol, etc, etc.

MichaelZuo 3 minutes ago | parent

“ Arhgap36 is known to cause developmental problems in other animals when it is over- or under-functioning. But it seems that in orange cats, the gene is overexpressed only in developing and mature pigment cells called melanocytes.”

This doesn’t make sense… if thousands of anecdotal reports in cats specifically report otherwise? And if it’s known to not be limited to melanocytes in other mammalian species?