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Hi! My name is Toby the tabby cat, and I often hear people say I'm adorable and so is my personality.

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PHOTO BY ANGELA FERGUSON

Toby

I'm only a year old and have lived at the Carleton County Animal Shelter for nearly six months. My owner dropped me off here in Debec and said having me neutered was too expensive. So the shelter people got me neutered, and my owner never came back to pick me up. Sigh! I don't know why. Everyone says I'm soooooo cute, sweet, gentle and playful. Plus, I love to teach people about myself.

Did you know I'm a marmalade tabby? All tabby cats have distinctive coats with stripes, dots or swirling patterns. A lot of people assume tabbies are a breed of cat. Actually, the tabby pattern – like the one I have – is a naturally occurring feature which could have come from my distant ancestors.

Grammy once told me tabby cats can come in many different colours and can be found in many breeds, including mixed breeds. When cats can pick their mate, the colouration of the population leans toward brown mackerel tabbies with green eyes, but sometimes tabbies can be orange, like ME! And I have hazel eyes.

Did you know there are four distinct tabby patterns? They include mackerel, classic, spotted and ticked. If you want to find pictures of these patterns go to the library or use Google on the Internet. A fifth pattern is torbie, which is part of another basic colour pattern. It is the "patched" tabby and may be a calico or tortoiseshell cat with tabby patches. A lot of other variations are caused by the interaction between domestic cat and wildcat genes in breeds such as the Bengal and Bombay.

So, what Grammy taught me and what I'm trying to teach you is the tabby is not a breed of cat and it is not a coat colour. It's a coat pattern, and it can show up in combination with a variety of coat colours. The word tabby comes from French tabis, which was earlier atabis, and in medieval Latin attabi. The initial origin of the word seems to be from the Attabiyah section of Baghdad where a type of striped silk was made and later used to describe cats.

I'm sure you've seen cats like me, but, if you're interested in hugging one, come to the animal shelter in Debec. There are lots of huggable cats just waiting for you to take them home.