Domestic Shorthair Colours and Patterns Explained

Is a Domestic Shorthair a breed?

No. Domestic Shorthair is a description, not a pedigree. It means a short-coated cat whose parents were not registered members of any breed. RSPCA Pet Insurance puts it plainly: the Domestic Shorthair is a type of cat rather than a recognised breed. Its long-coated cousin is the Domestic Longhair, and shelters use Domestic Medium Hair for the in-between coats.

In Australia we have a better word for the same cat: moggy. RSPCA South Australia uses it when it talks about the mixed-breed cats that fill its shelters. A moggy has no breed standard, no registry and no breeder. What it has is a coat, and that coat is where all the interesting variety lives.

Because a moggy is not a breed, its colour is the one thing a listing can describe with confidence, which is why listings read like a paint chart: “DSH, grey tabby and white,” “DMH, dilute tortie.” Learn a dozen terms and every listing makes sense.

Every moggy colour and pattern at a glance

Here is the whole list in one place. The genetics column uses the terms from the UC Davis Veterinary Genetics Laboratory, the lab most cat DNA tests are built on.

Coat length is a separate question from colour. A tortie can be a Domestic Shorthair, Medium Hair or Longhair, and so can every other row in the table.

What are the four tabby patterns?

Tabby is not one pattern but four, and Australia's cat fancy sets them out in the Co-Ordinating Cat Council of Australia tabby patterns standard: classic, mackerel, spotted and ticked. All four share the tabby signature of an “M” on the forehead, pencil lines running back from the eyes and rings on the legs and tail. What changes is the body.

Classic, which breeders also call blotched, has broad bands that curl into a bullseye on each side and a butterfly shape across the shoulders. Mackerel is the striped one most people picture when they hear tabby: narrow lines running from a spine stripe down the ribs. Spotted is a mackerel or classic pattern whose stripes have been broken into spots. Ticked is the odd one out: each hair carries alternating light and dark bands, so the body looks like sand or peppered salt, with stripes only on the face, legs and tail.

Underneath all of this sits the agouti gene. The UC Davis VGL agouti test explains that agouti is what makes the banded hairs that let a tabby pattern show. Every cat carries a tabby pattern in its genes. If the cat has the agouti version, you see the stripes. If it carries two copies of the non-agouti version, the bands fill in with solid pigment and the cat looks black, blue or another solid colour, even though the pattern is still there underneath.

Tabby is what cats look like when nobody is choosing their colour, which is why it dominates rescue. Browse adoptable tabby cats across Australia and you will see all four patterns on the one page.

Why are torties female and gingers mostly male?

Both answers come from the same gene. The UC Davis VGL coat colour page describes the orange gene as sex-linked, meaning it sits on the X chromosome. The orange version switches every black or brown pigment in the coat to orange. A cat with orange on all its X chromosomes is ginger; a cat with none is not.

A female cat has two X chromosomes. If one carries orange and the other does not, each patch of skin uses one or the other, and the coat comes out as a patchwork of orange and black. That is a tortoiseshell. A male has one X chromosome, so he is normally either all orange or all not-orange and cannot be a patchwork. The result is that tortoiseshells and calicos are almost always female. A male tortie does appear now and then, usually because of an unusual chromosome arrangement, and shelters treat one as a curiosity rather than the norm.

Run the same logic the other way for ginger. A male needs a single orange gene to be ginger. A female needs two, one from each parent, which happens less often. So ginger cats are more often male, but ginger females are real and not rare enough to be remarkable. Ginger cats almost always show a tabby pattern because the orange gene does not hide stripes the way non-agouti does.

Add white to a tortie and you get a calico, which Australian shelters usually write as “tortie and white.” Add the dilute gene instead and the black turns blue and the orange turns cream, giving a soft grey-and-apricot cat called a dilute tortie or blue-cream. Add a visible tabby pattern in the black patches and you have a torbie. You can browse adoptable tortoiseshell cats and adoptable calico cats separately on this site, because that is how adopters search for them.

Tuxedo, bicolour and white: what the KIT gene does

White on a cat is not a colour. It is a gap where pigment cells never arrived. The UC Davis VGL dominant white test places both dominant white and white spotting on the KIT gene, which controls how pigment cells spread across the body of the developing kitten.

White spotting gives you a coloured cat with white patches. The amount varies from a white locket on the chest, through the classic tuxedo of white chest, belly and paws on a black coat, to a bicolour that is half white, and on to a “van” that is white everywhere except the head and tail. Tuxedo is simply the name for the low-to-medium white spotting pattern on a black cat; the same pattern on a grey cat is a blue and white, and on a ginger it is a ginger and white. See adoptable tuxedo cats for the black and white version.

Dominant white is the stronger switch. One copy covers the whole cat in white, hiding whatever colour its genes would otherwise paint. Underneath, a dominant white cat may be a tabby, a tortie or a black cat, which is why two white parents can produce coloured kittens. Dominant white also carries a raised risk of deafness, most often in white cats with blue eyes, because the same pigment cells are needed in the inner ear. Not every white cat is deaf, and the shelter will usually have noticed if one is. Deaf cats do well as indoor cats, which is how most Australian rescues want cats kept anyway.

Smoke and silver are different again. An inhibitor gene strips colour from the base of each hair: on a solid cat that gives a smoke, on a tabby a silver tabby. Both are uncommon in moggies.

How is cat colour inherited, in plain words?

Think of a moggy coat as a few switches stacked on top of each other, each set by a gene. Working from the bottom up, using the UC Davis VGL descriptions:

• Base colour. The pigment is black by default. Other versions of the same gene soften it to chocolate or cinnamon, which are rare in moggies.
• Orange. Sex-linked. Swaps black pigment for orange wherever it is active. Two X chromosomes with different settings give a tortoiseshell.
• Dilute. The VGL dilute page explains that two copies of the dilute version lighten black to blue and red to cream. A single copy does nothing visible, so two black parents can have blue kittens if both carry it.
• Agouti. Decides whether the tabby pattern shows. Agouti on, you see stripes; two copies of non-agouti, you see a solid cat.
• Tabby pattern. Chooses classic, mackerel, spotted or ticked, and only matters if agouti lets it show.
• Colourpoint. A temperature-sensitive version of a pigment gene. Colour develops only where the body is cooler, so the face, ears, legs and tail darken and the warm body stays pale. Colourpoint kittens are born almost white and darken over their first weeks. Most pointed moggies are Siamese or Ragdoll crosses a few generations back.
• Inhibitor. Removes pigment from the hair base, giving smoke on solids and silver on tabbies.
• KIT: white spotting and dominant white. Adds white patches, or paints the whole cat white and hides every switch below it.

Because most of these switches are recessive or hidden, one moggy litter can hold several colours. A black mum and a ginger tabby dad can produce black, tortie and ginger kittens, plus blue and cream ones if both carry dilute. A mixed litter is the normal state of a shelter nursery.

What does colour not tell you about a cat?

Colour tells you nothing about temperament. The genes above set pigment, nothing else. There is no personality gene riding along with orange or black. Yet every shelter volunteer has heard the folklore: gingers are laid-back, torties have “tortitude,” black cats are aloof or unlucky, white cats are shy. These stories travel because people remember the cat that fitted the pattern and forget the many that did not.

The folklore has a cost. Black cats and plain tabbies are the common coats in rescue, so they have the most competition for the same adopters and tend to wait longer, while a pointed or silver moggy is snapped up for its looks. A cat's history, age and how it behaves when you sit quietly with it at the shelter are the honest predictors of what it will be like at home. Ask the staff or foster carer what the cat is like day to day; they know, and the coat does not.

Colour also does not tell you breed. A grey moggy is not a Russian Blue, a pointed moggy is not a Siamese, and a fluffy brown tabby is not a Maine Coon. Blue, point and tabby are moggy colours first and breed colours second. If you suspect a pedigree somewhere in the line, the breed-standard checks in our Maine Coon guide show how to test the idea honestly, and the answer is usually still “a lovely moggy.”

What colour does tell you is short: a tortie or calico is almost certainly female, a ginger is more likely male, an all-white blue-eyed cat should be checked for deafness, and a pointed cat will darken with age and cooler weather. That is the whole list.

How do shelters name colours on a listing?

Most Australian rescues list through PetRescue, and the PetRescue help centre asks the lister to pick a breed from a set list. A cat with no known pedigree goes in as Domestic Short Hair, Domestic Medium Hair or Domestic Long Hair by coat length. Colour and pattern are not breeds, so they go into the cat's name or description, in whatever words the shelter uses.

That means the vocabulary varies. You will see “tortie,” “torti” and “tortoiseshell” for the same coat; “ginger,” “orange,” “red” and “marmalade” for the same colour; “grey” and “blue”; “tuxedo” and “black and white.” Some shelters write “DSH” and leave colour out altogether, trusting the photo. Our listings carry the shelter's own wording rather than rewriting it, so a search for one term can miss a cat described with another. Browse by photo as well as by word.

Across the rescues we aggregate, Domestic Shorthairs are the large majority of cats listed, and tabbies are the most common of those, followed by black, black and white, and tortie. Pointed, silver and pure white moggies are the exceptions. Whatever coat you have in mind, start with adoptable Domestic Shorthair cats and narrow from there using the pattern pages for tabby, tortoiseshell, calico and tuxedo. If you are not set on a look, consider the plain black cat or brown tabby that has been waiting longest. The coat is the least important thing about it.