
Her blog, Kitty Contemplations, helps cat guardians better understand and care for the special beings they share their lives and homes with. ĭawn LaFontaine is a lifelong animal lover who always seems to have a little pet hair in her keyboard.
KITTEN TABBY CAT WINDOWS
The stuffed tabby made appearances at the World’s Fair in 1893 in Chicago and in the windows of Wanamakers in Philadelphia, and led to a surge in the creation of other stuffed animals.

The likeness of a gray tabby named Caesar was painted onto muslin in 1892 and sold as a three-piece pattern.

The American Bittern, for example, which is a vertically striped bird, stretches its neck up and sways when approached by a predator, looking for all the world just like the reeds in which it lives. The trick isn’t unique to cats, by the way. In fact, this non-agouti gene doesn’t always work perfectly, which is why many solid-colored cats have a hint of striping. The non-agouti gene prevents the hair from producing that lighter pigment while the strand is growing. It’s a gene that just hides the tabby-ness. The non-agouti gene isn’t a “non-tabby” gene. Here’s where you might argue that a solid-colored cat is, in fact, not a tabby cat. In other words, there will be no gene to stop and start hair pigmentation and he will end up looking like a solid-colored cat. But if a cat gets two recessive genes – one from his mom and one from his dad – he will be non-agouti. The agouti gene is dominant, which means if a cat gets even one from a parent, he will have agouti fur and look like a tabby cat.

That's how agouti hair strands get their bands of color. Then it slows the pigmentation down in the middle, and then speeds it up again at the end. When a hair is first growing, the agouti gene allows it to be fully pigmented. The agouti gene messes with pigmentation while each individual strand of hair is growing. The first set of genes that we need to talk about when discussing tabby-ness is the agouti gene, which allows hairs to be banded with darker and lighter colors.
