Stunning-looking calico cat but is she real?

 Here she is but is she real? We'll never know. The problem is that there are some very talented photo-editors around nowadays. Although I sense that in this instance the cat is real except that the eyes have been 'doctored' to look more interesting than they really are. I mean the colours are stunning. You just don't get odd-eyes that colour normally. 

As you no doubt know, we do see odd-eye colour in domestic cats with one of the eyes being gold or yellow and the other blue (no melanin pigmentation) but I have a feeling that the colour of these eyes have been enhanced through photo shopping. I don't know. I am forced to guess which is a weakness with current photography.

Almost all the great photographs you see nowadays are photoshopped either subtly or quite extensively. Photography is more like painting nowadays than recording what is in front of the lens. There's nothing inherently wrong with it unless you want to know what the reality is.

Stunning-looking cat but is she real? She is a calico and therefore female.

We also see quite a lot of cats on the Internet with "split-face" colouration. In this instance it would be due to the white-spotting gene or another name for this gene is the piebald gene. This causes a lack of pigmentation in certain areas of the fur and sometimes it's effect produces a sharp line down the middle of the face.

We can tell that this is a calico cat because there is white fur (fur without pigmentation), red or ginger fur and black fur (tricolour). The calico cat is a tortoiseshell-and-white cat. The phrase "calico cat" comes from America. Some people don't like it! They prefer the original description.

And as you also no doubt know, nearly all calico cats are female because that is the way the genetics work. The genes are sex-linked. And in the rare cases that there are male calico cats they are feminised males, somewhere between male and female without being hermaphrodites. They are sterile and they don't show any real interest in meeting with females (asexual).