The tabby is the default cat: the pattern you draw when someone says "draw a cat." But the default setting hides some of the best trivia in the entire cat world, including a forehead monogram, a wildcat inheritance, and a name that traveled here from a silk district in Baghdad. Eighteen facts, all true.
The pattern, not the breed
- "Tabby" is a coat pattern, not a breed. Dozens of breeds can be tabby, from Maine Coons to Bengals to the domestic shorthair running your household right now.
- It's the factory setting. Tabby is the ancestral pattern of the African wildcat, the domestic cat's direct ancestor. Every other coat is a later mutation layered on top.
- Technically, every cat is a tabby. All cats carry tabby-pattern genes; solid-colored cats just also carry a gene that masks the stripes. In bright sun you can sometimes catch the ghost stripes on a "solid" black cat.
- There are four core tabby patterns: classic (marbled swirls, often with a bullseye on the side), mackerel (narrow tiger stripes), spotted, and ticked (no body stripes at all; each hair is banded, like an Abyssinian).
- A fifth variety, the patched tabby or "torbie," layers tabby striping over tortoiseshell coloring. Yes, the naming system is out of control.
- The stripes are in the hair itself. Tabby coats use agouti hairs, individually banded with light and dark pigment, which is what gives the pattern its shimmer.
The famous M
- Every tabby wears an "M" on its forehead. It's part of the pattern's standard equipment, and humans have been inventing stories about it for centuries.
- The legends span religions. One story credits Mary, who blessed the cat that warmed the infant Jesus; another credits the prophet Muhammad, whose beloved cat Muezza is honored across many tellings. The genetics are less romantic but more reliable: the M comes free with the stripes.
- The word "tabby" came from fabric. It traces back to the Attabiy district of Baghdad, famous for its striped silk taffeta. The fabric was called "atabi," the striped cats matched the cloth, and the name stuck through French and English.
Tabby all-stars
- Garfield is an orange classic tabby, and every orange cat is a tabby, with no exceptions. Solid orange does not exist.
- Larry, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, is a tabby-and-white rescue who has now outlasted a parade of British prime ministers at 10 Downing Street.
- Morris the 9Lives spokes-cat is a red tabby, discovered at a Illinois shelter, who went on to "run" for president as a publicity stunt. Twice.
- "Mrs. Chippy," the tabby aboard Shackleton's Endurance, is one of polar history's most famous animals, and a bronze statue of him now rests on the grave of the sailor who cared for him.
Living with the default cat
- Tabby is the most common coat pattern in the world, which means the "ordinary" cat at the shelter is wearing the oldest, most battle-tested camouflage in feline history.
- Gray, brown, silver, orange, cream: tabby comes in every base color the cat genome can mix. The pattern is the constant; the paint job varies.
- The pattern says nothing about personality. Coat and temperament aren't meaningfully linked in the science, whatever the surveys say about orange cats.
- Tabbies camouflage absurdly well. The pattern that hid wildcats in scrubland now hides house cats in laundry piles, cardboard, and precisely the rug that matches them.
- The nickname "tiger" is backwards. Tigers and tabbies both wear stripes, but the house cat's closest big-cat relative genetically is the tiger anyway: about 95.6 percent shared DNA. The tabby isn't imitating a tiger. The tiger is a tabby that made it big.
Put the M to work
Somewhere in your contacts is a person who would be improved by learning, via unsolicited text, that their cat is wearing the oldest camouflage on Earth. We'll handle the delivery: one real cat fact a day, to any number, starting seconds from now. STOP works anytime; it just rarely gets used.
The 100 cat facts master list has the rest of the arsenal.