Hi everyone , thanks for the welcome and the fascinating discussion! The black on black idea is amazing! It prompted me to remember an apparently all black cat I knew in New Zealand, whose stripes did indeed show-up in the sunshine! Jack, short for Jack the Ripper (vicious he was! ), had another colour characteristic which is unique in my experience; he was white underneath! What I mean is that every individual hair in his fur was white except for the last ¼ of an inch, which was black. Thus; when his fur was lying normally he looked black but when you stroked him the wrong way , he was white ! Has anyone else ever seen that in a cat?

Here’s another thought that’s been provoked:- My own cat, Black, ….let me just clarify something before I confuse anyone; my two cats are a ginger tom and a black tom, their names are ‘Red’ and ‘Black’. They’re littermates and, I assume half brothers. …now, Black isn’t quite all black, he’s got some white patches; on his lower abdomen, his chest, and some faint white patches in what would be his arm pits, if he had arms, …on the inside of where his front legs join his body, got it? Now, I don’t want to lower the tone of the conversation but I can’t avoid the thought that his bears an uncanny similarity to the places on MY body where I have hair ! This leads me to the conclusion that ‘Black’ has white pubic hair! So, the question becomes; Why do cats have pubic hair, and is pubic hair (in any animal) intrinsically different from the rest of it’s hair or fur? My own guess is that the only reason for it is to ‘advertise’ sexual maturity , but it seems somewhat pointless in an animal with such a sense of smell as a cat! Furthermore, it seems that the gene for pubic hair has been around since the time of the common ancestor of cats and humans; 65 million years or so !

Can anyone comment on Jack or Black?


[This message has been edited by Martin (edited February 13, 2001).]