Tangentially related, but https://old.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/ is a subreddit dedicated to specifically orange-furred cats. I was expecting quite something else when I first read the subreddit name.
It's largely folklore, but there is a kernel of truth to it. Orange cats have a pretty "silly" attitude, kind of like golden retriever dogs. Black/tux cats are usually docile and friendly. Female tortiseshell/tabby cats are lunatics. But there's also quite a bit of individual variation. I'd say it varies more from cat to cat than the "breed" would imply.
Can confirm female tortiseshell cats are, yes- lunatic is the best way to describe their personality. My family had several and they were all a combination of smart and crazy, mostly the latter. As a teenager I found it amusing to teach one of them to ride on my shoulder like a pirate's parrot. An unintended consequence is that she would also do that to house guests, who weren't expecting it, making a five foot vertical leap from ground level from behind to perch on their shoulder.
This describes my black cat exactly; she runs and hides at the door bell, but when it all calms down, she inevitably comes out to see who it is and within half hour is trying to climb in their lap and is begging for attention from the new person. I had an orange cat once and he pretty much thought he was the family dog. I’ve never seen a friendlier cat, didn’t matter if it was another cat, a dog, a person, or a squirrel; anyone who would play he was ready to go.
We have an almost pure-black void that screams bloody murder at everything--pick her up, screaming; walk in the room, screaming; give her food, screaming--but cuddles more aggressively than any cat I've ever heard of and purrs nonstop (when she isn't screaming). She hisses as a primary communications mechanism. I hear that cat hiss more in a day than every hiss from every other cat I've ever had combined. She also panic poops when the other cat gets within 5 feet.
More anecdata; my orange boy also thought he was the family dog. He was rather dumb as a rock, but sweet as pie. Loved every human or animal he ever met.
My current cat is a calico and white and she's...emotional. =)
My next door neighbour was a ginger crossed with a persian. Let's just say there was a LOT of orange. The cat was very friendly to humans, and an absolute terror to foxes and any cat they didn't consider a neighbour.
My parents got a mature older orange cat who was baffled by doors. An open door was no issue but a half door open? Baffling! He sat and stared at the impossible to navigate two foot wide gap.
He loved BBQ it was obvious his previous owner did a lot of BBQing. My Dad dropped some raw hamburger for him.
Dad's Lay-Z-Boy chair wouldn't do down. What he didn't know was the cat was under it. The chair would slam down on his head but that was of no concern of the cat.
Huh, I had not heard that. In my experience it's pretty evenly split -- at least, in my circle of friends and family there's eight black cats, four of each. (Most short-haired, one long-haired black cat that's female.)
Cat coat color is an X linked gene, so there's no representation of it on the Y chromosome.
Let's denote this as Xo and Xb for the genes. An orange female cat is XoXo, a tortoise shell / calico cat is XoXb and a black female cat is XbXb.
Male cats are either XbY or XoY - there are no tortoise shell male cats (there are cats with Klinefelter's syndrome that can be XbXoY but only mentioning this for a full coverage of the topic - and for a real example of this https://disneylandcats.com/cat-profile-francisco/ and it confuses things since XbXbY and XoXoY cats would be difficult to identify without a genetic test).
The thing with all of this is that the genetics for XoXo or XbXb and XoY or XbY are exactly the same percentages.
Doing the Punnett squares for cat coats and all the possible pairings and you get simplified
Genotype Count Percent of XX or XY
XoXo 3 25%
XoXb 6 50%
XbXb 3 25%
XoY 6 50%
XbY 6 50%
It ends up with 2/3 of the orange cats being male and 2/3 of the black cats being male. This doesn't quite match real world situations since you could have a colony that is dominated by orange cats (or black cats ... or neither).
Also noting that you can occassionally get a "tortiose shell" esque male cat via a pretty rare process known as chimerism. i.e. two or more different embryos merge in the womb resulting in different parts of the body being formed from different embryos (meaning different DNA depending what part of the body you sample from). And of course for this to result in a cat you can see, they have to get lucky enough that the combination of embryos still produces a viable fetus.
Not to take anything away from the info you've provided since it is all interesting. But it seems francisco's gender is pretty debated. There are a few that talk about them being a female with certainty, but without any reasoning I also take their info with a grain of salt.
The most dumb cat I had was the siamese cat. She was not orange. She learned how to steal from a pan closed by a lid only when she spent a summer in country with my old cat, who was a street born, and he was really smart. At some point he led me for a mile, insisting that I followed him. I followed because I was curios. It turned out my cat planned an assault on some house (not on humans but on an another male cat there) and wanted me to help.
But my siamese was extremely stupid. For example, it is the only cat that could be distracted. If you took a cat on your lap and it didn't feel like sitting on your lap, it would be hard to keep cat there, it would take any chance to run away. But my siamese would allow me to distract her and would forget that she wanted to run away. It could be distracted from food also. Her attention span was seconds, not like most of cats who get an idea and become obsessed with it.
She had broken spine near the tail. My theory is cats hide their real brain somewhere in the back of the spine, while the thing in their heads exists to mislead humans.
My kitten had iron-deficiency when he was doing that. Maybe worth a quick check/ask and with a little bit of dietary change or a supplement the problem could be addressed.
We have a very fluffy orange guy who is... not dumb, exactly, but I'd say he operates on a different plane than the rest of us. He often stares at things that aren't there -- or, at least, that none of us can see -- and he tends to puzzle things out more slowly and differently. For example, he didn't vocalize much at all as a kitten but has picked up sounds from other cats in the household. He didn't purr at all until very recently (he's six). He can jump like a champion, but hasn't figured out he can leap up to a spot with another cat's kibble. (Instead he sits and looks at it longingly while his sibling jumps up there and eats it if it's left unguarded...)
However, some of that might be explained by the fact that he was a very, very sickly kitten who almost didn't make it, and he seems to have a mild case of cerebellar hypoplasia.
Internet legend. All cats do the same things. Some individuals are smarter, but I doubt it has anything to do with fur color. And I don't recall hearing anything special about orange cats from people who have many cats.
