Silver Tabby Cat Finnegan

Finegan. Click on the picture to go to the Flickr original

What about this cat? Well, he is an ordinary but extraordinary cat as all cats are extraordinary, certainly in terms of their agility. I feed a stray cat, who I named, Timmy, who comes about once a day. He comes over a high brick wall (about 7 feet in height). He simply ambles up to it and jumps to the top. Cats leap their way to about two thirds up the wall then almost climb the remainder with their claws and momentum.

Finegan looks like an athletic cat as he is slender and probably not too heavy. He has blue eyes, Blue eyes are eyes where the pigment has been taken out of the iris. Cats that are white and coloured (bicolors) sometimes have blue eyes as the piebald gene or whiting gene turns the eyes blue as well as parts of the coat white. All white cats sometimes have odd-eyes, one coloured and one blue. The famous white Turkish Angoras have odd eyes sometimes as I recall.

Finnegan has a beautiful tabby "M" mark on his forehead - nice and symmetrical and a very nice looking M it is. I feel that I have become a bit of an expert on the tabby M as I have seen a lot of them!

He seems to be a silver tabby and perhaps a mackerel tabby judging by the stripes on his legs but I don't believe that stripes on legs means that the cat is a mackerel tabby.

He has a nice square and quite long muzzle which is a bit like the muzzle on the Chartreux and which makes the Chartreux look like it is smiling all the time.

The silver tabby is caused by the presence of the Agouti gene (A) that produces the tabby appearance by colour banding each individual hair stand and the inhibitor gene (signified by the letter I) that supresses the production of pigment that is fed into the growing hair. There is also the mackerel tabby gene (if Finnegan is a mackerel tabby) Mc. In the silver tabby the expression of the inhibitor gene is at a fairly low level. In the chinchilla silver, which is produced by the same gene combination there is a high level of expression of the inhibitor gene and the cat is much more silver looking as a consequence. A feature of the inhibitor gene is its wide range of expression.

Finnegan is a great looking cat and this photo is part of my Yahoo cat-photo-technique group.




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