orange tabby....

[meanysmomma]

we have an orange tabby that is a female...jsut how rare is this? i heard somewhere that orange tabbys are normally male as calicos are prodominantly female... any answers welcome please

 

[Willowy]

Red females aren't nearly as rare as male torties/calicos. The ratio is about 75% male/25% female for red tabbies, whereas only about 1 in 3000 torties/calicos are male.

 

[orientalslave]

Not really rare.  A red female will have a red father and a red or tortie mother.  You are right though that torties are usually female.

 

[callista]

If you see a red cat, it's probably a boy, but sometimes they're girls. About a quarter of the time, I think. It's got to do with how calico cats are always girls, because the "X" in their sex chromosomes can carry a color, and if a cat has two X chromosomes (which almost always means it's female), then it can carry two colors, brown and red, which in a female both get expressed. Males have only one X so they are either brown or red but not both. So the upshot of it is that most of the time when a female cat has red on one X, she often has brown on the other, making her a tortie instead of a solid red cat. So all of the boys with red on their X will be red, but only half of the girls with red on one of their X's will also have red on the other X, and be red. Which means if you see a red cat, there's a 75% chance it's male, 25% female, and if you see a calico/tortie cat, it'll practically always be female, unless some genetic glitch has somehow created a male with two X chromosomes.