Cat on Stroll Is Utterly Dumbfounded By First Sight of Sheep

I still remember the first time my “pandemic kitty” saw a dog. As an indoor cat born in spring of 2020, she had a limited social life for the first year or so. There were other cats in house to play with, of course, and she got a good view of birds and squirrels out on the patio and the humans in her little family. She even hunted a mouse that invaded my pantry before she was a year old. But she knew very little of the wider world and its vast array of animal life, and when a friend brought over her dog for the first time, my poor cat freaked right out. She went full-on Halloween cat, with all her hair standing on end and her back arched as high as it could go.

The dog was unbothered by this display, and settled down at his mom’s feet. This chill attitude made my cat far more curious about the new invader, and she spent the rest of the visit staring at him with wide eyes from behind increasingly closer pieces of furniture.

The cat in this video is enjoying a relaxing evening stroll when he passes a pasture occupied by some fuzzy sheep, and becomes absolutely captivated. The black and white “tuxedo cat” stands on his hind legs, his eyes wide, liked he’s a meerkat instead of a normal feline. Between the pose and the coloration he looks like such an astonished little gentleman.

Related: Sheep Patiently Waits for Livestock Guardian Puppy to Give Her Kisses in Sweet Video

That, my dear chap, is what’s known as a sheep.

The Dignified Tuxedo Cat

A tuxedo cat is a black and white bicolor cat with mostly black marking on their heads, backs and torsos, and the upper parts of their legs. It makes the animal look as if they are wearing a little black suit. Some tuxedo cats may even have “mustaches” of black markings around an otherwise white muzzle, as Anton here does.

My cat is also a tux, though only her chin, chest, and tummy are black, along with white paws.

Bicolor coats in cats is caused by a white spotting gene that is different from their other color gene, which determines how much white a cat will have in their coat. The amount of white is actually graded on a scale from 1 (lowest) to ten (highest). Though my cat’s mother is tabby-and-white, the places her coat are white are precisely the same as where her daughter’s coat is white.

Sheep Coloration

Though cat coloration is a very complicated topic, with a variety of genes that determine the color of a cat’s fur, it’s somewhat different with sheep. White sheep (as shown here) are called white, while “colored sheep” are those that refer to any other color than white. For sheep, non-white coloration is actually a recessive trait, which probably comes in handy for sheep breeders—most of whom have been breeding sheep with the intention of getting the whitest wool possible for untold generations. This is why most sheep are white.

We do not, however, think it’s the color that has Anton so addled by the sight of these sheep. We think he’s just shocked to see them.

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