Theme 1 – Stereotypical “goofiness” of orange cats (anecdotal support & refutation)
- rob74: “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.”
- xattt: “Tangential and sample size n = 1, but the two orange cats in my life were spankers/lovers of cat bongos whereas all other coloured cats were not.”
- mschuster91: “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.”
- etcetcetceta: “I agree but I don't think it's related to prejudice against redheaded humans, wrt the cats I think it's some sort of confirmation bias.”
Theme 2 – Genetic/biological explanations linking coat colour to behaviour
- khelavastr: “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.”
- reilly3000: “This paper demonstrates a connection with behavior. I personally suspect gingers have smaller amygdala.”
- Noaidi: “Humans also carry this GTPase as well. GTP is energy source of receptors called G protein coupled receptors…. In humans, both DNA and RNA are mostly expressed in the brain and in the endocrine system.”
- MichaelZuo: “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.”
- pas: “people are very good at seeing their pets conforming to their expectations, whether that is scientifically true or not :)” (citing research that breed explains only ~9 % of behavioural variation).
Theme 3 – Cultural naming, meme propagation, and internet humour
- stuaxo: “Wait, do people in the US really call them ‘orange cats’ - I just thought that was a reddit / internet thing.”
- orphea: “Many places outside the US call them orange as well.”
- ivanjermakov: “I thought it was popularized by internet/Reddit as a joke denoting that ginger cats are ‘special’: https://www.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/”
- shagie: “I've long held that the nine lives of a cat are not a sequential thing, but a quantum superposition of the cat.”
- bitwize: “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?”
- DonHopkins: “Hey now, that's prejudice!” (with a link to the South‑Park “Kick a Ginger” video).