Fur real, it is not just fluff!

It’s monsoon season in India, my favourite season. During our Bengaluru days, as the rain gods descended to cool the parched earth and infused every breath with petrichor, Pippi and I had a routine: we’d sit on the balcony, me sipping my hot cup of tea and caressing his soft brown-black fur as he watched the world go by. With every stroke of my finger touching his skin, he’d go a little deeper into a zizz. I, on the other hand, snooped to look for tell-tale signs of ticks and fleas—pesky bloodsucking insects that can be monsoon nightmares—while admiring how a tiny tuft of his silky fluff gets swooped by the winds. 

Fur is the first thing that stands out in our pets. When you look at a dog or cat, you immediately note their coat colour and patterns and maybe give it an instant monicker…Kariya, Kencha, Brownie, Belli, Benne, Chukki…and those names tend to stick. If you have a chance to pet them, you quickly feel the texture and thickness of the coat, and if you have the auto-tuned eyes of a pet parent, you begin speculating about its health or tidiness with mere gentle strokes. 

Fur has quite a place in a pet household—quite literally. No matter how often you vacuum or mop, they have the magical power to get everywhere. Over time, everything in the house seems to have grown a fur coat! But before you diss the precious fluff, let me tell you about the now-extinct Salish wool dog—a white, hairy dog bred by Indigenous people on the Pacific coast of present-day Canada and the US, who used the long, wool-like fur of the dog to weave warm garments for the bitter winter months.

Cats and dogs come in all shades of black, brown and white and many have patches of these hues. Pippi, for instance, has a healthy mix of black and brown in every hair of his fur, but two white tufts on his neck stand out, and then there is a black tip to his brown tail. Some dogs have impressive patterns—like a patch on an eye or brown eyebrows on a pitch-black coat. Thanks to selective breeding based on the coat, some have come to define a breed—like the spots of the Bengal cat (a hybrid between ​​Asian leopard cat and domestic cats) or the deep red coat of the Irish setter. And then some breeds such as poodles have hair rather than fur, and some have neither, like the sphynx cat. Oh, how can I not mention the double-layered coats of huskies and mastiffs that almost kill them in tropical summers?

The fur palette can look vivid, but it all boils down to how much of the two pigments—the black-hued eumelanin and red-coloured phaeomelanin—are in the fur, resulting in colours like brown, grey, pale brown, deep-red, orange, cream, gold, yellow, or tan. Eumelanin also colours the nose and eyes black, and not enough of it makes the nose pink and eyes blue. White fur occurs when cells do not produce any pigment at all. The genes determine where and how much of these pigments are present in different parts of the fur—in dogs, eight chromosomes are associated with coat colour, while the X chromosome is linked to coat colour in cats. 

For the cat aficionados, here’s some fur trivia—calico or tortoiseshell cats with large patches of red and black fur are almost always females because their colours come from two X chromosomes. Cats, including leopards and tigers, have ‘pre-patterns’ of their spots and stripes even before birth and develop as they grow. But the prize for the most exciting patterns and colours goes to tabby cats—who have a range of variegated and blotched coats and a distinct ‘M’ marking on the forehead with an eyeliner effect, darker paws and a pink nose—a bit of everything. 

Our pets’ fur also changes with the season: just before summer, they shed their thicker winter coat to bear the heat, and just before winter, they all become a fluffier version of themselves. And because they have fur all over, our pets lack sweat glands on their skin and can only sweat through their paws, which explains their wet footprints and discomfort during the hottest days of the year. Fur real, the world of fur is intriguing! 

Tailspin is your monthly column on everything that’s heartwarming and annoying about pet parenting.

(The writer is a science communicator and mom to Pippi, a five-year-old rescued Indie, who is behind her drive to understand dogs better. She posts on X @RamanSpoorthy)