About 81 percent of orange cats are male, says Dr. Jerold Bell, adjunct professor of genetics at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University in North Grafton, Massachusetts. While female cats will inherit an orange coat only if they carry the orange gene on both X chromosomes, if a male carries the orange gene at all, he will be orange, says Dr. Susan Konecny, medical director for Best Friends Animal Society in Kanab, Utah.⁠ ⁠ “As the frequency of the orange gene is much less than the frequency of the black gene in the general cat population, the chance of having two orange genes is much less frequent. This makes male orange cats more frequent than orange females,” Bell says.⁠ ⁠ _____⁠ ⁠ What does this all mean for their offspring? If a mother cat is orange, her male kittens will be orange regardless of their father’s color, Konecny says, and if a mother cat is tortoiseshell (a mix of black, white, and orange), half of her male kittens will be orange while the other half...