This is fairly typical for genetic studies. We can observe an association, without understanding the causal relationship. Those of us who take the molecular biology/biophysical view of genes and proteins have been watching the geneticists slowly discover that "the allele of a gene that codes for" mental model is very limited; at least they're starting to pay more attention to the regulatory changes and indels and structural rearrangements, even if they don't have the tools to explain the underlying mechanism.
Like most hair/skin coloring, it's related to melanin production, regulation, and distribution.
I have gone through a slow attrition of “serious” subs over the years as they’ve all slowly become toxic. I pretty much just have goofy, fun stuff or niche interests left at this point.
Cat picture pollution arrived around 2005 with Facebook. Directly driving it was the new idea of a cellphone camera. AOL and the era before it didn't have the cat picture pollution problem because they didn't have the technology to post them.
> If you're looking for a boost of household happiness, then you might want to consider getting yourself a cat.
> In a new study published in PLOS One, an international team of researchers analyzed publicly available data across 93 countries to examine the relationship between happiness scores, domestic cat density, and infection rates of Toxoplasma gondii – the parasite that affects as many as 1 in 3 people and which felines are the primary host of.
> ...
> "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness," say the study authors in a press release.
Wealth, health, cats and Toxoplasma gondii: An ecological correlational study of subjective well-being across 93 countries (September 30, 2026) - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0357911
> Conclusion
> This ecological study provides novel insights into the magnitude and robustness of the associations between happiness, cat density, T. gondii exposure, and socioeconomic factors across 93 countries. Our main findings showed that, besides the typical associations between subjective well-being and some socioeconomic factors, national happiness was largely and positively associated with cat density and largely and negatively associated with IgM T. gondii exposure. These results underscore the need for future studies integrating both socioeconomic and biological determinants of happiness and including longitudinal and interdisciplinary approaches to elucidate the underlying mechanisms and processes.
Thank you Claudia. The cat pollution problem predates your training. In summation, cat pictures started as a nonpathogenec virus on Facebook and slowly matured into a slight benefit to some and an off-topic scourge to others. It's net benefit to humanity are debatable.
I never understood the extreme love for cats. I considered getting one for my daughter but the toxoplasmosis alone makes cat ownership an immediate nope and that’s before the cat piss/poop you can immediately smell in a house with cats in them.
Cats spent the last 4000 years or so evolving to be more adorable to humans. The reasons we love cats are rooted in our basic cognitive functions, which cats are abusing. I am not taking a piss when I say that people who don't like cats are more likely to be neurodivergent.
I would like you to expand on how my neurodivergence argument holds up if it doesn't hold up in the way I think it does. If you're about to say autists like cats more, I'm going to flip the desk.
> "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness," say the study authors in a press release.
Yes. But we also call redheads "redheads" as a rule, not "gingers" - except that the "ginger" thing has filtered over here via the Internet in the past, I dunno, 20 years.
Like, I can't recall anybody describing a redheaded person as a "ginger" in the 80s or 90s, (location: Missouri) it's something I've only encountered since there's been more language cross-pollination due to the Internet.
South Park really spread "ginger" as the term in the US. Since that episode, everyone I know uses ginger instead of redhead, whereas I only learned the word ginger from that episode.
This sense of biscuit persisted in US English for a long time. The National Biscuit Company (makers of oreos and fig newtons) only changed its name to Nabisco in 1931. The Kennedy Biscuit Company was subsumed by the New York Biscuit Company which merged with the American Biscuit Company to form the National Biscuit Company in 1898. Closes Wikipedia
Cookies in the UK are a subset of biscuits, but not all biscuits are cookies. Do you not have any other types of biscuits (using the UK term) in the US?
But the etymology of a word doesn't prove that someone is using that word wrong, or people on both sides of the pond would have to start baking our biscuits a second time.
In the US, "ginger" is a seasoning, not a color. Like, in general; we do not refer to anything as being ginger-colored unless it's a sort of pale yellowish tan.
That's a fairly new thing. Growing up, I never heard anyone use "ginger" in that way. It was always "redhead." Or sometimes "strawberry blonde" for lighter shades.
It's true. A person is ginger, but nobody ever says things are ginger coloured. Ginger isn't even really one colour - it's a spectrum of orange-containing hair colours.
My experience (cat owner myself, son of cat owners and regular cat-sitter) confirms what the article says: orange cats are no more or less prone to doing seemingly stupid/weird things than cats of any other color. More seriously, I think this stereotype is a direct continuation of stereotypes against red-haired humans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_people_...), so it shouldn't be encouraged...
"Almost always male" is slightly overstating things. Cat color is a sex linked gene, so a male cat is orange when it has a copy of the gene on its single X chromosome. Female cats can also be orange under normal circumstances though, and about 20% of orange cats are female.
Compare that to tortoiseshell or calico cats, which requires two different color genes (with calico requiring the "white spotted" gene in addition to two colors). That means something unusual usually has to happen for those colors to occur in male cats, which is why less than 0.1% of calicos are male.
Tell that to my female Standard Issue Cats lol. One is food motivated, pretty intelligent when it comes to food and pretty fat, and her twin sister is routinely making me wonder if she's an orange cat with a modified fur. Dumb as rocks but excessively cute.
I had couple of cats (orange male and tortoiseshell female) that lived 20 years after I picked them off the street. The female had only one kidney and the male had an extra vertebra but these things only became a problem in their last year.
They were both very calm creatures. The male was one of the most gentle cats I've ever known. I really miss him greeting me by nodding at me from the sofa when I got home.
Can you describe what the male looked like? I have a tortoiseshell who's all crooked. Her paws are twisted inward, her tail is shaped like a spring, her rear legs are longer than her front legs. She's all weird. Now I'm wondering if she has extra stuff like a vertebra too. Does your male cat looked overall normal despite the extra vertebra?
We had a cat with a "pig tail" as in his tail was shaped like a pig's and couldn't straighten out. The vet said it was some relatively common birth defect and wasn't a major issue.
Oh, cool! I never heard about another cat with a similar tail as my tortie's. The vet said she was probably born like that, but didn't say anything about this being common-ish.
My brain seized up trying to picture this. They didn't say vertebrum, so that's not just a wee bone but a whole other second spine! How does it even...?? I must know!
You're correct. My neophyte Latin chops be exposed. Let me explain what I just learned with my figurative antennae (plural, not antenna which also ends in 'a' and is singular), something about first and second declensions and neutered...
I was just thinking how behavioral differences of red haired foxes, cats, and humans from their closest relatives are explained by the same sort of proopiomelanocortin and other substantia nigra differences from weak MC1R activity.
As someone who lives with 4 cats, one of which who is orange and conforming with all stereotypes, I implore you to further that line of inquiry. While the OP paper doesn’t claim behavioral differences are supported, it doesn’t falsify them and there could be a dynamic there. If you could genetically encode shamelessness it might encapsulate the behavior. It’s not a lack of intelligence per se, more of a lack of inhibition.
This paper demonstrates a connection with behavior. I personally suspect gingers have smaller amygdala.
Did you know people with blue eyes are more likely to have bipolar disorder? This of course doesn’t mean everyone blue eyes has bipolar disorder but it makes it more likely. I think the issue may be playing out in orange cats as well. It’s certainly not going to give me every orange is weird, but it increases the likelihood and I think that’s why we see the stereotype play out.
I had an orange cat growing up in the 1970s well before the Internet and out of the seven cast I own as a child. It was very much different.
It's extremely interesting that the genes that regulate this are non-protein coding. More light shed on the actual functionality of "junk" DNA, even if it's for cats.
Which makes sense because anesthesia doesn’t work on them as well. One or two encounters with a dentist that doesn’t know it and it’s quite natural to develop such a fear.
That's true. They seem to be more sensitive to pain in general, though. And I've wondered if that might in some people lead to a heightened degree of something called Misanthropic Person Memory: https://oscarybarra.lsa.umich.edu/Main_Site/Publications_fil...
So in the US, they call them orange cats. In Korea, we call them 'cheese tabbies' or 'cheese nyang(kitten).' Someday, when I leave this place, I'd like to get a cat. I really like the ones with broad faces. But right now, I can barely even take care of myself
They finally proved that the brain cells of all orange cats are a single brain cell in a quantum state of superposition between all of them? Erwin Schrödinger would be proud.
I've long held that the nine lives of a cat are not a sequential thing, but a quantum superposition of the cat. Just as Pavlov selected dogs for his classic experiment in psychology; Schrödinger - understanding the quantum nature of cats - selected a cat for his thought experiment.
A cat lives nine simultaneous lives. This explains many of the phenomena that one observes with cats.
First off, there's the classic "that looks like my cat" from the internet, that other cat could very well be a parallel instance of your cat.
Second, there's the perceived goofiness of cats as they chase imaginary things when they're forgetting where their bodies are at a given time. One instance of the cat could be locked in mortal combat with the elusive red dot while the other one is jumping at what looks to the humans around him as zoomies or greebles ( https://www.reddit.com/r/greebles/ ).
Kittens are especially prone to being confused by their quantum nature and prone to those activities.
The easiest way to pay attention to only one self-instance for a cat is the simplest, sleep. This is why cats have been reported to sleep 12 - 16 hours, and kittens up to 20 hours per day ( https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much ).
Depressing that some would call you a kook. Creativity is where new science happens.
I have often been called a kook myself. I feel my Schizoaffevctive disorder is expressed because the quantum state most people express is not the same as mine.
Interesting question. Cats apparently have "dichromatic" vision, and orange is among the colors that they basically can't distinguish from grey.
I have an orange male. He's awesome, and he doesn't leave anything on the table as far as cognitive ability goes. He's just very wrapped up in his important cat business that mostly resolves around territory, chipmunks and hanging out with his enemies.
My cat desperately meowed at me this morning to go outside to hang out with her enemies, which I denied her request. She brought a very much alive and unharmed chipmunk home the other day which was booking it around our great room until we corralled him outside with a broom. The live bird incident was even more dramatic. It’s like having a mischievious goblin living in your house. But she does keep the mice from coming in during the winter!
“ Arhgap36 is known to cause developmental problems in other animals when it is over- or under-functioning. But it seems that in orange cats, the gene is overexpressed only in developing and mature pigment cells called melanocytes.”
This doesn’t make sense… if thousands of anecdotal reports in cats specifically report otherwise? And if it’s known to not be limited to melanocytes in other mammalian species?
Another anecdata - my cat growing up was orange, and he was plenty smart. He was very relaxed/chill but would come when called and was an excellent hunter of the house mice.
His mom was a very intelligent calico (she communicated with people impressively well), and his dad was an unknown feral cat, so I think his smart-cat genes were more noticeable than whatever correlates with orange.
Humans carry this GTPase as well. GTP is energy source of receptors called G protein coupled receptors. They are about 750 these and many of them are catecholamine receptors, like the serotonin and dopamine receptors.
For cats it very well may be different. Genes do not express activity the same indifferent species and they’re definitely not the same in different parts of the body. Genes can express RNA in one part of the body and more DNA and another part.
But I think this deletion is really about how it affects the methylation the gene.
"We first performed RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) on skin tissues obtained from the auricles of different adult calico cats (#19, #20, and #22, females, precise ages unknown)"
Auricles are the earlobes.
"We then analyzed multiple skin tissues obtained from a young calico cat that died of unknown causes (#01, female, 3 weeks old) "
"A) Expression levels of ARHGAP36 and IGSF1 in cat auricles (left) and skin tissues (right). RNA-seq data were obtained in small auricle pieces of different coat colors derived from different cats (left) and in skin samples of different coat colors derived from a single calico cat (#01) (right)."
Biological samples
Domestic cat blood Inakazu Dog & Cat Kashii Hospital https://www.inakazu-vet.com/
Domestic cat ovary Cat clinics in Japan N/A
Domestic cat auricular Cat clinics in Japan N/A
Which means it's inconclusive if the gene is responsible for behavior.
But, collectively we know it may be.
Like most hair/skin coloring, it's related to melanin production, regulation, and distribution.
I have gone through a slow attrition of “serious” subs over the years as they’ve all slowly become toxic. I pretty much just have goofy, fun stuff or niche interests left at this point.
It isn't like the relevant environment — the set of Internet forums — somehow predates human influence; it is nothing but the sum of human influence.
Cat pictures at least add joy and mirth, and are driven by real people without outside motivation.
If anything is pollution in that environment / context, is is the rise of content driven by surveillance capitalism and political corruption.
At this point (at the risk of turning a measure into a target), might we be able to gauge the natural-ness of a forum by the number of cat pics?
Scientists Find a Surprising Link Between Cats And Happiness Across 93 Countries (05 October 2026) https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-a-surprising-li...
> If you're looking for a boost of household happiness, then you might want to consider getting yourself a cat.
> In a new study published in PLOS One, an international team of researchers analyzed publicly available data across 93 countries to examine the relationship between happiness scores, domestic cat density, and infection rates of Toxoplasma gondii – the parasite that affects as many as 1 in 3 people and which felines are the primary host of.
> ...
> "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness," say the study authors in a press release.
Wealth, health, cats and Toxoplasma gondii: An ecological correlational study of subjective well-being across 93 countries (September 30, 2026) - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0357911
> Conclusion
> This ecological study provides novel insights into the magnitude and robustness of the associations between happiness, cat density, T. gondii exposure, and socioeconomic factors across 93 countries. Our main findings showed that, besides the typical associations between subjective well-being and some socioeconomic factors, national happiness was largely and positively associated with cat density and largely and negatively associated with IgM T. gondii exposure. These results underscore the need for future studies integrating both socioeconomic and biological determinants of happiness and including longitudinal and interdisciplinary approaches to elucidate the underlying mechanisms and processes.
I can assure you it was 0.000% influenced by artificial systems.
Evidently, evaluating human sentiments is outside the scope of your training.
“Dog people” heavily outnumber “cat people” almost always in polls. Like 44% to 18% in this one https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/docume...
Your neurodivergence argument holds up, just not in the way you think it does.
Plus it’s probably the toxoplasmosis that brainwashes us to love those furry little things.
Elsecomment I mentioned a recent article. Scientists Find a Surprising Link Between Cats And Happiness Across 93 Countries - https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-a-surprising-li...
> "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness," say the study authors in a press release.
The paper itself is https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0357911
In the UK these are ginger cats.
Like, I can't recall anybody describing a redheaded person as a "ginger" in the 80s or 90s, (location: Missouri) it's something I've only encountered since there's been more language cross-pollination due to the Internet.
Though, https://www.reddit.com/r/catsinpants/ works for both forms of English.
Gasoline is from gas + plus the chemical suffix "ol" short for the latin "oleum", and "ine" meaning "made of".
the confusion is solely in your reading comprehension skills and not in the GP's use of the words
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw
I don't know why this is being downvoted. Does "ginger-colored" sound right to you? It doesn't quite work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw
I think the association with discrimination against red haired humans is a stretch though
Compare that to tortoiseshell or calico cats, which requires two different color genes (with calico requiring the "white spotted" gene in addition to two colors). That means something unusual usually has to happen for those colors to occur in male cats, which is why less than 0.1% of calicos are male.
Have had >13 cats in my life, and they're all fucking weird.
They were both very calm creatures. The male was one of the most gentle cats I've ever known. I really miss him greeting me by nodding at me from the sofa when I got home.
We only found out their health issues from exams.
My brain seized up trying to picture this. They didn't say vertebrum, so that's not just a wee bone but a whole other second spine! How does it even...?? I must know!
Actually, I think I got it right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebra
No that's plenty enough. Carry on!
This paper demonstrates a connection with behavior. I personally suspect gingers have smaller amygdala.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381166835_The_Skin-...
There is something different about them, and the red hair thing is a coincidence.
I had an orange cat growing up in the 1970s well before the Internet and out of the seven cast I own as a child. It was very much different.
See: https://cryptogenomicon.org/encode-says-what.html and https://thefinchandpea.com/2012/09/10/random-genome-naked-ge... for one perspective on how to approach this.
https://www.dentistryiq.com/dentistry/article/55260898/redhe...
I've long held that the nine lives of a cat are not a sequential thing, but a quantum superposition of the cat. Just as Pavlov selected dogs for his classic experiment in psychology; Schrödinger - understanding the quantum nature of cats - selected a cat for his thought experiment.
A cat lives nine simultaneous lives. This explains many of the phenomena that one observes with cats.
First off, there's the classic "that looks like my cat" from the internet, that other cat could very well be a parallel instance of your cat.
Second, there's the perceived goofiness of cats as they chase imaginary things when they're forgetting where their bodies are at a given time. One instance of the cat could be locked in mortal combat with the elusive red dot while the other one is jumping at what looks to the humans around him as zoomies or greebles ( https://www.reddit.com/r/greebles/ ).
Kittens are especially prone to being confused by their quantum nature and prone to those activities.
The easiest way to pay attention to only one self-instance for a cat is the simplest, sleep. This is why cats have been reported to sleep 12 - 16 hours, and kittens up to 20 hours per day ( https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much ).
I have often been called a kook myself. I feel my Schizoaffevctive disorder is expressed because the quantum state most people express is not the same as mine.
I have an orange male. He's awesome, and he doesn't leave anything on the table as far as cognitive ability goes. He's just very wrapped up in his important cat business that mostly resolves around territory, chipmunks and hanging out with his enemies.
This doesn’t make sense… if thousands of anecdotal reports in cats specifically report otherwise? And if it’s known to not be limited to melanocytes in other mammalian species?
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dog-breed-individual-beh...
> Breed offers little predictive value for individuals, explaining just 9% of variation in behavior.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0639
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/which-dog-breed-s... (here note how big the overlap is between breeds for most traits, and clumpiness is rare, but present)
His mom was a very intelligent calico (she communicated with people impressively well), and his dad was an unknown feral cat, so I think his smart-cat genes were more noticeable than whatever correlates with orange.
Humans also carry this gene. https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q6ZRI8/entry
In humans, both DNA and RNA are mostly expressed in the brain and in the endocrine system.
https://www.proteinatlas.org/ENSG00000147256-ARHGAP36/tissue
For cats it very well may be different. Genes do not express activity the same indifferent species and they’re definitely not the same in different parts of the body. Genes can express RNA in one part of the body and more DNA and another part.
But I think this deletion is really about how it affects the methylation the gene.
Source: I have had my genome sequence. I was not dissected.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222...
"We first performed RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) on skin tissues obtained from the auricles of different adult calico cats (#19, #20, and #22, females, precise ages unknown)"
Auricles are the earlobes.
"We then analyzed multiple skin tissues obtained from a young calico cat that died of unknown causes (#01, female, 3 weeks old) "
"A) Expression levels of ARHGAP36 and IGSF1 in cat auricles (left) and skin tissues (right). RNA-seq data were obtained in small auricle pieces of different coat colors derived from different cats (left) and in skin samples of different coat colors derived from a single calico cat (#01) (right)."
Biological samples Domestic cat blood Inakazu Dog & Cat Kashii Hospital https://www.inakazu-vet.com/ Domestic cat ovary Cat clinics in Japan N/A Domestic cat auricular Cat clinics in Japan N/A