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Tweedledum (waiting his turn) + Tweedledee (in pot). Two months. Males ♂

As you can see here, the short tail is a common trait in our local street-cats. It is not common to find a full-length straight tail amongst the ferals of our tropical island. Our kitties are mostly rescued, strays. Of the more than 80 that have/had shared our home over the past decades, less than a dozen had full straight tails - the rest were quarter-length, half-length, or three-quarters-length; many even had "kinks" in their tails. There were even a few totally tail-less.

It may interest you that the tailless cat is a natural mutation that occurred not just 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 mutations occur naturally are islands ... it appears that the geographical limitations contributed to the proliferation of a mutated gene.