Tortie & Calico Cat Hats

Tortoiseshell and calico cats come with a reputation. Owners call it tortitude, a word coined to describe the rumored strong personality of these colorful cats: hissing, swatting, biting and chasing, and very little patience for human foolishness. There is a sliver of science behind the joke. A 2016 UC Davis study of more than 1,200 cat owners found that females with orange-linked coats, meaning torties, calicos and torbies, were more often reported to hiss, swat, bite or chase, although the differences were minor, so the tortitude on these hats is strictly for laughs. Coat color genes sit on the X chromosome, which is why calicos are nearly all female; roughly 1 in 3,000 is male. The collection runs from the three badges owners type into search, TORTITUDE, TORTIE MOM and CALICO CAT MOM, to sentence designs that give the cat her due: the calico who bites out of love, the tortie who earned her reputation, the calico with three colors, all of them angry, and the tortie with two moods, spicy and spicier. TORTITUDE IS CONTAGIOUS and the two-moods line each get a second colorway. Tortitude is also the design one tortie merch seller calls its most popular, so it opens the page. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear one for the cat who runs your house, or give it to the friend whose tortie just left a mark.