Mackerel Tabby and Salmon

This is Emerson. He is a mackerel tabby cat. I am not sure if he is brown or grey because I think there is a slight blue or cyan cast over the picture due to the room light which is the main source of light for this photograph. As the light is blue, the brown tabby coat may have been neutralised to look grey. Not sure if I am correct. Maybe the white balance could have been adjusted? What do I know about white balance!

This photo is interesting, however. It is different from the usual cat photograph. It looks set up. The fish is salmon. Does Emerson like fish? Probably yes but not all cats like fish. My Charlie prefers Marks & Spencer roast chicken for example. He will eat fish but only as a backstop food. Cats rely heavily on smell to get an appetite for a certain type of food so even a favorite food may be just sniffed at and left if it is cold and has no smell. When Charlie leaves a bit of human food (I only give him a limit amount of it) I micowave it if it has been standing for a while to put some smell back into it. He then eats it. But it only requires about 12 seconds heating. Anymore at it might burn a cat.

The salmon is raw too. Should we feed raw or cooked food to our cat if we are giving human treats? Well, either/or is the answer but it must be limited. The fish I give to my cat is cooked but some of it is partially cooked and he eats both, no problem. If raw, though, it must be stored properly. Homemade cat food is raw mashed up human food such as chicken with added supplements. The supplements are important as they contain essential vitamins and amino acids etc. without which the cat's body functions will not work at an optimum. Omitting them will cause ill health. Home made cat food is the best potentially but care needs to be exercised. Human food most of the time if definitely incorrect as it does not contain all the required ingredients demanded by a cat.

The gene that produces the mackerel tabby pattern is Mc. Emerson has a goreeous tabby "M" on his forehead. They are not as good as that normally. There are some nice legends about how the tabby cat got the M mark. All wild cats are tabby cats in one form or another. Spotting is a form of tabby coat.

The picture is a link to the original on Flickr by the way.



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