Saturday, November 07, 2009

Many toed polydactyl cats - six in all or even more

Dear George
I am one of two black brothers in the care of West Oxfordshire Cats Protection (www.westoxoncats.co.uk ). As you can see we look very much alike - apart from four interesting features. My paws are bigger and (I think) better because they have six digits not just five. You can see the difference in the photo of me (higher up) and my brother and see how it looks from the detailed photo of my back paw. Some cats have seven digits.
Love CP Kitten

Dear CP Kitten,
Impressive. I see that your feet look sort of large when you are sitting down and there's an odd sort of bump sticking out. I can only count five on the bottom photo of your paw close up, but, of course, the sixth digit is higher up the leg. I can just see the dew claw
on the bottom middle of that picture. I like the way the paw pad has got a little extra bit on the left hand side (in the bottom photo). Normal cat feet have four digits at the bottom and the smaller one up the side of the ankle (so to speak).
A scientist who studied more th
an 100 polydactyl cats reported that extra digits were more common on the front than the back paws, though you have them on both. Also sometimes there were seven digits in all - ie six on the main pawpad. Sometimes the extra toe is just an extra dew claw higher up rather than a full toe. Just occasionally the claws on the extra toes retract differently on the back paws from the normal claws.
Extra toes are the result of a domi
nant gene (according to C. H. Danforth author of Morphology of the feet in polydactl cats,American Journal of Anatomy, (1947) 80, 143-171 available on Google Scholar). Exactly how many extra toes and their size and shape varies from one individual to another. Six or seven toed cats aren't going to have any great advantage, so that evolution isn't going to encourage them to flouish at the expense of ordinary cats.
I guess we cats just have to be grateful that cat breeders aren't interested in this variation. There are always humans interested in the bizarre who are breeding bald animals, animals with stumpy legs, animals with floppy ears, huge animals or tiny animals. I have even seen photos of bald guinea pigs.
Humans can't mind their own business. They start with some unusual animals, breed them to each other, keep breeding them with each other and, bingo, there's a new breed with a tiny gene pool (unhealthy). Luckily six toed cats have escaped the attention of these humans and so, because they are not inbred, are as healthy as normals. Let's hope it stays that way.
Love George

9 comments:

  1. Dear CP Kitten,

    I am curious to know if you have some toes to spare? Humans are pretty experienced in swapping parts amongst themselves, and so I am sure that vital work has already been done somewhere for us felines (considering our importance relative to humans, I should hope it has, at least). As I unfortunately seem to be missing certain parts, and you are so fortunate as to have spares, perhaps we could work out an exchange? Being a young kitten, you are probably not acquainted with the wonders of tuna-flavored Pounce. It would be my pleasure to introduce you to them. I should dearly love to scale a tree. I can have my human place a canister in the very next post. Say the word!
    Regards,
    Puss-Puss.

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  2. we love your cute paws!!!

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  3. Hi George, I'm a black cat too...with extra toes! I have 7 on each of my front feets and 5 on each of my back ones. Some humans think I look funny and think my feet must be disformed. But my mom says having extra toes just makes me extra special!!!

    Ernie

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  4. Oh dear George, do I get the feeling you might be having a a pair of black cats with extra toes moving into your house? I will never be able to visit you if this turns out to be the case and do we want to share Celia with strangers?
    Your worried friend,
    Harvey

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  5. How impressive. I hope your new human(s) will keep you both together. It would be such a sad thing to separate you. I was fortunate my human kept my Mum, my sister and me. I think my Mum wasn't too thrilled but my sister and I were thrilled.

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  6. What a beautiful pair of cats. I'm sure they will tell the person who adopts them their names eventually. We do like polydactyl paws and our Mum learned recently that an ancient indo/eurasian (?) name for cat was "ghad" which is a word that means "grasp" - polydactyl cats are great at grasping!

    Whicky Wuudler

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  7. Harvey, don't worry! I don't think Celia will bring home anything or anybody that can hurt you.
    And....you can always come to visit us :-)
    Hugs
    Cayenne

    PS. I must admit that the kittens are lovely.

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  8. Oh! These kittens...are just adorable!

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Help for cats whose humans show behaviour problems.

This blog is devoted to the study of human behaviour. We cats, who live with this sometimes unpredictable and always feeble minded species, can benefit from seeing their behaviour in its proper scientific context. The study of feline dilemmas, training problems, and difficulties with humans, can only benefit all of us. All of us train our humans - to buy the right food, for instance, but many of us do not have knowledge of how to improve our training methods. The human species is obviously not as intelligent as the cat, but nevertheless can learn quite a lot - if properly managed. Topics of interest include the use of claw and order, purring as a human reward, rubbing your human up the right way, when to bite, spraying as a method of making our wishes known, ignoring the human, human harassment, human inattention and sheer human stupidity. I welcome your questions. Photos can be sent via my secretary's website, www.celiahaddon.com This blog has been chosen as one of the top 50 feline blogs by Online VetTechprogramms.org