Among all cats, especially among our Chinese garden cats, pure white cats have always been responsible for their appearance. If you have been engaged in stray cat rescue for a long time, you will find that pure white cats are the easiest to be adopted. Because pure white cats look really good. Especially the pure white Linqing lion cat, if raised well, its appearance is almost as good as that of a ragdoll cat. This is not bragging.

In fact, pure white cats are not the pinnacle of appearance among white cats. “Blue-eyed white cats” are the pinnacle of appearance among pure white cats.

The white hair makes them full of fairy spirit, and the blue pupils make their eyes look like the deep universe and the vast sea. Therefore, blue-eyed white cats can be said to be "the fairy on top of the fairy."

But there has always been a saying in the cat breeding circle, that is, most blue-eyed white cats have congenital defects and are deaf!

This statement is currently somewhat ambiguous, because it is really difficult for people to accept that such a beautiful blue-eyed white cat is actually deaf? But what I want to tell you is that from a cat genetics perspective, this statement is true.

The history of blue-eyed white cats

What we currently call "blue-eyed white cat" is a description of the appearance of a cat with white hair and blue eyes. However, around 1880, the blue cat and white cat almost developed into an independent cat breed.

At that time, someone used "Angora cats" and "Persian cat breeding" to breed "blue-eyed white cats", and found that this kind of cat was very beautiful, so they planned to breed it in large numbers. However, in the subsequent life, the owner discovered that these blue-eyed white cats The white-eyed cats seemed to have poor hearing, so the blue-eyed white cats were given up!

Since then, people have realized that hearing problems may be common in blue-eyed white cats.

At first, the statement that all blue-eyed and white cats were deaf was just speculation, but with the development of veterinary medicine, this statement was confirmed!

To understand why blue-eyed white cats are deaf, we need to know why the cat’s hair appears white. There is a dominant gene on the cat’s autosomal chromosome: W. When the autosomal genotype is WW or Ww, the cat is White hair will appear all over the body.

But the double W gene not only controls the color of the cat’s hair, it also controls the color of the cat’s eyes. Under its control, cats with white hair may have blue eyes.

There seems to be no problem with the above content. The double W gene creates blue-eyed white cats. However, the problem is that the double W gene inhibits the secretion of melanocytes in cats.

In the early embryonic development of cats, melanocytes play a crucial roleIt plays an important role, especially in the hearing development of cats. If melanocytes are not involved, the cat will lose hearing or be born with poor hearing development.

Therefore, "blue-eyed white cats" are the external imaging characteristics of the lack of melanocytes in cats, and are also the imaging characteristics of cats with poor hearing development. Therefore, it is correct to say that most blue-eyed white cats are deaf.

But in real life, not all blue-eyed white cats are deaf. Among all blue-eyed white cats, about 60%-80% have hearing problems.

Even if blue-eyed white cats are deaf, it will not affect their normal life, because cats have very strong perception. When the owner shouts, the cat can perceive the sound through hearing, and can also perceive sound waves through the flesh pads on the soles of its feet. Vibrations in the air.

Therefore, even if blue-eyed white cats have poor hearing, it does not affect their normal life. This is why many stray blue-eyed white cats can still survive in the wild.

Therefore, blue-eyed white cats can be kept as pet cats. Although they may have hearing problems, it will never affect their normal life. If you raise a blue-eyed white cat, don’t dislike it!