We were only remarking on what makes a cat the colour it is ,we have three who seem to have bits of all sots just splodged in random amounts all over their bodies .There seems to be no rhyme or reason to ,but within the litter our longish haired 2 tabby mix up kittens came in was one shorthaired white pawedblack kitten .Can a female moggy in season concieve kittens within the litter by different males.
They can, but black and white and tabby cats are commonly found in the same litter and having the same parents. Cats have two colours - orange and black/brown/yellow (diluted blacks, as it were). Both the black in the black and white cat, and the brown in the stripes of a tabby are from the same source. It lives on the X, so female cats can be both orange and black - tortieshell.
Tabbyness is a separate gene. Non-tabby-ness is recessive, and just a masking of tabby-ness. In the right light you can often see very subtle stripes on otherwise black cats - more so on kittens, I think. (This doesn't work on orange/ginger cats, afaik, just on black/brown/yellow cats. Hence no bright orange cats and lots of ginger tabbies.) There are also variations on the tabby pattern.
Hair length is separate again (long's recessive), as is the gene for white patches of fur (which iirc comes in options of hardly any/some/lots). There's a different one again for white-all-over, which over-rides the other colours and patterns when it appears. That's where you get your all and almost-all-white cats, and that one's linked to deafness.
That's a very simplistic explanation. Sorry! But cat genetics is such that you get all manner of mixtures in the same litter and from the same parents. When I had a pregnant cat I spent far too long trying to work out what her kittens would look like, and concluded that almost anything might come out. In the end, two were tabby, and two were black and white like their mum (and mostly they were too premature and tiny to live).
