Walk This Way

Mo. Seven weeks old. Female ♀

Yes, she is tail-less. As mentioned to ...

"... There must be a mutant gene in our local street cat population ... it is not common to find a full-length straight tail. Our cats are rescued or adopted, and amongst the more than 80 cats that have come into our home over the past decades, only a half dozen or so had full-length tails ... "

I have been asked if she's a Manx. It may interest you that the tailless cat is not just a natural mutation that occurred on the Isle of Man in the late 18th century (the origin of the Manx), but also appeared in several places in the world since earlier times, such as Japan and Southeast Asia.

When Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the English colonial administrator, was in the Malayan Archipalego (1811-1823), he noted and wrote about the abundance of tailless/shorttailed cats in the region. He was a historian, with a keen interest in zoology, and also the founder of the London Zoological Society and the London Zoo.

In 1868, Darwin wrote in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication that "Throughout an immense area, namely the Malayan archipelago, Siam, Pegu, and Burmah, all the cats have truncated tails about half the proper length, often with a sort of knot at the end."

In ancient Japanese folklore, tales of tailless cats are common.

It is interesting (to me!) that many of the places where these mutation occur naturally are islands ... it appears that the geographical limitations contributed to the proliferation of a mutated gene.