I present for your delectation a selection of The Street Cats of Bulgaria. Which one would you take home? (I have numbered them for convenience):
1. The first cat I saw in Bulgaria—a tuxedo cat sunning itself on a ledge:
2. An appleheaded ginger tom sunning itself in the street:
3. This cat, in Tarnovo, looked part Siamese:
4. A black kitten resting on a car. My post on Tarnovo yesterday shows me picking it up and giving it fusses:
5. Now this is a real fluffmeister:
6. A Tarnovo tuxedo sunning itself:
7. This guy was peeking over a curb. You can also see him with a pal in photo #8:
8. The Peeker with a friend; they’re waiting at a spot where they know they’ll be fed (see last photo):
9. This female was shy and I couldn’t get a good photo, but her markings were lovely (taken in Plovdiv):=
10. Moggie carefully picking its way over a stone bridge in Tarnovo:
11. A Plovdiv tabby asking for food at a restaurant (and of course I gave it some):
12. Another tuxedo cat (there are plenty of these). I recently read that every one of the cat mummies from ancient Egypt—and there are thousands of them—were tabbies. That must reflect their ancestry in the tabby-marked European wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica). Other colors were probably developed later through artificial selection.
13. A wary black cat with lovely golden eyes:
14. Another restaurant tabby in Plovdiv, who also got food (I made sure that every cat, regardless of their shyness or boldness, got roughly equal amounts of food):
15. Yet another restaurant cat, a fluffy one:
16. Ginger cat, Plovdiv:
Finally, there are people who make sure that at least some of street cats are fed. This lady in Tarnovo distributed dry kibble to the local moggies.
Finally, I’ve already posted these adorable kittens, so you can’t choose one of them:
Number 6. The Tarnovo tux would be the most likely to overcome my wariness of cats.
Beauty in diversity!
They are all beautiful, but #11 is my favourite. You can’t beat a classic shorthair tabby.
15 and 11!!! And 6 and 4. And all the kittens as well, svp.
😀
No. 1 for me. I haven’t had a cat for almost 35 years, but I’m feeling the need quite strongly. And I’m allowed to keep up to two in my apartment …
Hard choice but I’d pick number 11. So pretty!
Take-homies: #4, 5, 8, 11, 14, and possibly 3, 12 and 15 (looks shy).
3, 4 & 11 are my favourites but how can you choose? Take all of them!
Most of them appear to be spayed / neutered, which is surprising given their street life. We already have a tabby (Zizou) and a tux (Gunner), so #6 for me.
We just got back from Morocco, where we too found street cats everywhere. (pictures to follow soon). The cats of Morocco also appeared well feed and cared for and many where spayed/neutered.
So Bulgaria is basically the real-life Ulthar, then?
Here is a question to ponder: why are the cats so variable in coat color? If they are interbreeding & mixing their genes, shouldn’t they look pretty uniform by now?
Anthropic disruptive (apostatic) selection: owners may prefer variety. There seems to be a diversity of likes in the comments.
9 is spectacular!
I really like the photo of 6, I’d frame that one!
10 has obviously not seen the warning signs about walking on dangerous places.
15 is beautiful and 14 has a lovely face and I like the pose of 13.
I could easily fall in love with any of these cats!
I like moustache-cat in #7. He looks like a sweetie. And all the black cats ever. I’m a sucker for black cats.
I’m curious, when people say street cats are they specifically referring to strays? That’s the way I would’ve interpreted it but just because those cats are wandering about doesn’t mean they are strays. These cats look much too clean and well-looked after to be strays. I would guess most of them have a proper home and are just enjoying the sun. Although if they get fed by lots of people I suppose they could be well looked after communal cats.
I think they are just looked after. My friend feeds two strays in Israel (they even come to her house and she buys food for them) and those cats look similar to these ones.
This is a trick question, methinks.
Of course, my current lord and master likely wouldn’t be too happy with competition, so the correct answer is, “none of the above.”
But, in some unimaginably tragic alternate universe in which Baihu never found me, the answer there would be, “all of the above.”
b&
11 or 15, unless I can choose OMG, OMG, OMG OMG from America.
Sub
In our small French city, there is an emphasis on neutering and feeding cats who adamantly prefer living in the streets. Our vet does these operations for free if this type is brought to him. One can become an official adopter of such a feline.
At present, we are feeding ‘Harry’ (looks almost identical to #14), named because he likes to sleep in the haricot patch. He’s either one of these cared-for street dudes, or he is not very happy with his human caretakers. When he sees me stepping out of the sous sol’s door, he races right up the garden path to be fussed over and fed. A moment of pure joy. 🙂
Unless all of the above is an option, #13 woukd be my choice, reminds me of my cat growing up. I like cats with attitude.
They’re delightful moggies all.
does veterinary technology extend as far as a long-acting feline oral contraceptive that can be incorporated into food for ferals. Lovely as they are, they are a problem, and contraception is the least inhumane solution.
I’m not aware of any such pharmaceuticals, but a very common practice here in the States is what’s called “TNR” — trap, neuter, release. If you see a feral cat with the tip of its ear cleanly trimmed, it’s been neutered as part of such a program. And neutered ferals still protect their territory and thus are an effective means for keeping local feral cat populations in check — neighboring cats can’t move in, and they don’t produce more kittens.
b&
I knew of TNR ; I didn’t know the significance of the trimmed ear. Filing into the braincell, not to be needed again for 37 years. But vital then.
They’re all beautiful so tough choice. I might choose #7 because s/he could possibly have eye problems (hard to tell for sure from the photo). If not, then I’d wait for a kitty to choose me.
Like Grania, I have a soft spot for black cats. But for this thread, I’d wait and see if there was a cat that didn’t get picked, and that’s the one I’d take. That’s just me. Prevents having to make an impossible choice, too. 🙂
I love the fluffy kitties, but they’re all gorgeous.
no. 5 almost looks like a Maine Coon. He has the little “M” on his face, and a fluffy tail. Very handsome.
That one looks like there’s Wildcat in its recent ancestry. Maybe very recent.
I can’t see all of the body of #15 but what I do see suggests a very pretty cat. Pretty eyes, too, and I like the fluff. On the other hand, I believe the cat chooses you, not the other way around; certainly that’s what happened with Max and me. You can’t ignore a cat’s looks, but personality and congeniality are more important. I’m sure cats choose their humans for the same reasons.
I’ve got a cat somewhat like #9. The contrast between stripes in red and even-toned black always surprises me. The even-tone black means non-agoui homozygote, but that genotype clearly is not expressed with red. Quit complicated epistasis there.
The genetics of cat coat color is fairly straightforward:
– The wildtype agouti allele (A) allows the production of a yellow band in most hairs. The mutant allele (a) produces a uniformly pigmented hair. These show up as striped (A/A and A/a genotypes) vs sold (a/a genotype). This is independent of the more complex genetics of the stripe pattern itself (see below).
– Black and orange (sex-linked), X^O and X^B. Female heterozygotes are genetic mosaics (tortoiseshell or calico) due to X-inactivation, so the concept of dominance and recessiveness doesn’t have meaning here.
– Full color (D) dominant to dilute (d) (grey and cream variants of black and orange).
– Black (B/B and B/b) dominant to brown (bb). It appears that there is >1 gene with the brown-inducing effect.
Two genes produce white colors:
– The tyrosinase gene, usually abbreviated C, with at least 4 alleles. C (fully colored) is dominant to c^S and c^B (Siamese and Burmese) which are dominant to c. c/c individuals are albinos, with pink eyes. c^S and c^B alleles produce temperature sensitive enzymes, which allow pigment production only in the cooler body extremities (paws, tail, face).
– The KIT gene, usually abbreviated W. Three alleles:
– white-dominant (W) which produces an all white coat with non-pink eyes. Eyes are usually blue and cats are usually deaf but neither phenotype is as penetrant as the all white coat color.
– white-spotting (w^s) produces white-spotting phenotypes. The wildtype allele (w) produces no white fur. These alleles show incomplete dominance: w^s/w^s genotype has lots of white (typically >50%), with some black/orange), w^s/w has some white but is mostly black/orange; w/w has no white.
The stripe pattern (as opposed to color) is more complex, with a major gene, Tabby, which probably has several alleles, and several modifier genes.
There are interesting epistatic relationships: orange coat is epistatic to aa, so orange cats always have stripes (and the orange patches in a calico are striped even when the black patches are solid). The white phenotypes are epistatic to any pigmented phenotypes, etc.
There are other genes, but those above account for most of the color diversity among domestic house cats.
As an interesting exercise, determine the genotypes of each of the cats in Jerry’s post, wrt the genes listed above.