Learn Something New Everyday with Dani X

In honor of the recent addition in our house, the little calico cat Snow White, I have decided to learn about calico cats today! One of the first things almost everyone knows about calico cats is they are 99.9% female! And the one in three thousand that are male are born sterlie. It's sad but true. Because male calicos are born something called Klinefelter's syndrome. This syndrome means they are sterile and also have really terrible health problems that can range from brain damage to organ failure.

But enough sadness, the female calicos are amazing cats! For starters, because of the complex genetics that make a cat a calico, you can't specifically breed for the trait, it has to happen naturally. Calicos are one of the three state cats in existence, as the state cat of Maryland. The state chose the calico because it has the same colors as the Baltimore Oriole.

Unllke the black cat who got a lot of bad publicity, the calico has been considered lucky for centures! The maneki-neko, the beckoning cat of Japan is based on how lucky Japan thought calicos to be. These maneki-nekos date back to the 1870s, so the calico cat has enjoyed a long time as lucky! Japanese sailors also used them as good luck on their ships and were thought to protect from storms and ghosts of jealous ancestors!

Calico cats have appeared in artwork throughout time from a Japanese artist named Utagawa Kuniyoshi in the 1800s to 18^th century painter Jean-Baptiste-Simeon-Chardin. Chardin liked to paint calico cats with seafood hanging from hooks. And of course to the Maneki-Neko of that same time period.

Japan also has a famous calico cat called Tama. Back in 2007 there was a railway station in a rural town called Kinokawa that was going to be closed because of money trouble. But the town made the stray calico cat Tama station master, even making her a little costume. She would greet all the passengers and he grew to be famous enough to draw in a crowd, which increased the profits just enough to save it from being closed.

Sadly, Tama passed away in 2015, suffering heart failure. The public adored her so that she was given a Shinto funeral at the station she lived at and even became a goddess! Shintos have many gods and goddesses and many are animals. Tama was enshrined at a local cat shrine following her elegant funeral. 

There was also a famous calico in Australia! Her name was Marzipan and she lived in the Astor Theater in Melbourne. For her long life of twenty-one years, she greeted the patrons and sometimes sat on the laps of the moviegoers. She passed away in 2013 but the people loved her so much they had a memorial for her!

Calico have been traced back to Egypt. There was a study done about following the migration of domestic cats along trade routes in Europe and Northern Africa. This deteremined that the part of the cats having the orange mutant gene that makes a calico can be brought back along Mediterranean port cities in France, Spain, Italy and starting in Egypt. I hope you all learned a lot today! I really love my calico cat! Here she is!

Sources:
Meth, Dan 2014 May 12 21 Reasons Why Calico Cats are the Best Cats
Finlay, Katie 2017 November 25 4 Things You Didn't Know About Calico Cats
Associated Press 2015 June 28 Cat Stationmaster Tama Mourned in Japan and Elevated as Goddess