Mike is actually a dark chocolate color, although most people see him as black. His coat does an interesting thing. When he has an injury, which happens regrettably often (he simply does not know how to back down from a fight), the guard hairs there come in white. In this photo, you can see where he has white eyebrows. He also has three white eyelashes on the same eye, which so far I have not been able to get to show up in any portrait of him, the result of an altercation where his eyelid got slashed. Fortunately, his eye was not injured.
Notice the one elegant white whisker.
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Beautiful Boy!
I also share grounds with a dark choc cat. He has small white spots here and there. The more social he is the more white hairs I notice.
He’s an indoor cat nowadays and the only fights he’s in are with the other cats in the Lair. Occasionally there is a little furry fluff flying around but no serious wounds so far.
But it’s hard to get a good photo of him.
I once had a photographer tell me that the proof of whether or not you were a master of your medium was if you could get a good picture of a black cat in a coal cellar. This particular picture is better in the high resolution format. I reduce the size of the file so that it will fit on the blog nicely and not occupy too many bytes. So some of the details are lost.
Mike’s attitude at that moment was “Who let the paparazzie in here?”
My “black” cat is just the same: deep chocolate brown. He often likes to snuggle with other dark items presumably as camouflage, leading us at one point to dub him our “piano panther.” He also still has faint kitten stripes on his chest, though he is now 13 years old!
When he was still very young, Harry got one of his hind legs caught between the seat and the hard plastic arm on a desk chair. He hung there for we don’t know how long. My husband rescued him when he got home from work by taking apart the chair! He (the cat) had to have stitches where the hard plastic lacerated his upper leg. He’s got lots of white hairs there. I don’t think he has any white whiskers though.
I’ve heard that there is no such thing as a ‘black’ cat – that they are always varying shades of very dark brown. This is usually noticable when you see them in sunlight.
And there is almost always one stray white hair somewhere.
Also, when my cats have been ill they’ve sprouted white hairs around their eyes and mouth, which then disappeared when they got better again.
Lua had speckled whiskers – they were very unusual and also quite attractive.
Speckled whiskers! That must have been very cool. I had a cat a long time ago who had some whiskers that were striped white and black. She was a calico named Kitty Ball, named because we had a dog who liked to carry her around by her head. We were always telling him “No, no,the kitty is not a ball” and for some reason that statement evolved into the name Kitty Ball, whom we called KB for short, which often then got lengthened into KB Baby.
Ahh, he’s beautiful. He reminds me of my parents’ cat, Smokey, who is a similar chocolate/black colour, depending on the light.