Thursday, December 1, 2016

FYI

Hi everyone!  This is Smokey.  Remember me?  I'm the gray girl who lives on top of the cages in my very own room.  And you guys are going to be happy for me because I have found my purpose as the kitty blogger for StreetCats!  Now you may or may not get that finding your purpose in life is a big deal, but I am just so happy right now!  And here is my picture just in case you don't remember me.
Do you want me to tell you my purpose?  Or would you rather guess?  Okay, I'll tell you.  My new purpose is to be an educator, an educator who specializes in things to know about cats.  Because I'm a cat.  And I'm getting this information from an incredible machine called a computer.  We have one of those machines at StreetCats!  Someone recently asked me how I'm getting to the computer.  Well, I'll tell you only one thing.  I do it at night.  I'm not going to tell you anything else, except the obvious, that I'm a cat and cats are amazing!

Now before I move on to the new information I have for you I need to give you an update on the last post I wrote, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.  That post was about how some people think cats are a problem.  Well, I just want to tell everyone to be vigilant and to put your thinking caps on!  I saw another article that referred to us cats as a problem!  The name of the article was The Case Against Cats and it is in the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly.  I'm not being paranoid, cats.  We need to come together to figure this out!  I'm sure glad I'm a StreetCats cat!!

Okay, now for the new things I've learned.  We have a kitty at StreetCats that is all white.  Her name is Cassie and she is very sweet . . . and available for adoption.  And she is all white.  Here is her picture.
Now, as I said, Cassie is all white.  Except sometimes when I look at her I think I see yellow.  And sometimes her tail looks . . . gray??  Well, I was so curious that I decided to do some investigating.  And here is what I learned.  There are three ways a cat can be white.  One is if they are albino.  We're not going to talk about that because it's very rare.  The second way is if the cat has the dominat white gene (W).  Those cats have blue eyes and are white all over.  But here is another way .  There is a dominate white spot gene (S).  Yeah, I know, it's confusing.  But if there is a tabby cat with white on him, he is really all tabby and the white spot gene (S) just masks the tabby part and makes it white.  And . . . one step further . . . the white spots can cover the whole cat and make a tabby cat look all white!!

So here's my question.  If Cassie's real color is being totally masked by this dominant (S) gene, I wonder what color she really is!  Confused?  Well, I'll study more!

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