Why are my kittens always tabby?
The striped pattern is dominant — and two very common colours, golden and silver, are tabby underneath whether or not they look it. Here is the rule that decides it, and how to breed solid kittens on purpose.
The short answer
Tabby is dominant and solid is recessive. A cat needs TWO copies of the solid gene to look solid, but only ONE copy of the tabby gene to be striped. So the moment one parent is tabby — or carries a colour that is secretly tabby-based — most of the litter comes out striped. Nothing is wrong with your cats or with the calculator: this is simply which gene wins.
The surprise: golden and silver are tabbies
This is the part that catches most breeders. Golden is not a colour of its own — it is a wide band of warm undercoat that only appears ON a tabby cat. Silver works the same way, on the same tabby base. So a «blue golden» queen is genetically a tabby, always, even when her stripes are soft and hard to see in the coat. Pair her with anything and roughly half the litter (often more) inherits the tabby gene from her alone.
How to get solid kittens on purpose
One rule, and it is reliable: a solid cat carries two copies of the solid gene, so solid × solid can only produce solid kittens. If solid is the goal, both parents must be visibly solid — and neither may be golden, silver, shaded or chinchilla, because all four of those sit on a tabby base. A tabby parent can still give you solid kittens, but only if it carries a hidden solid copy, which you cannot see from the coat — you learn it from its own parents or from a litter it already produced.
Why some kittens show stripes anyway
Two honest footnotes. First, a genetically solid kitten often shows faint «ghost» markings in early weeks, especially in the sun; they usually fade as the adult coat comes in. Second, red and cream cats are their own case — the tabby markings on them are frequently visible no matter which pattern gene they carry, which is why a truly patternless red is so rare. So «I can see stripes» and «the cat is genetically tabby» are not always the same statement.
Check your own pairing
The SANORIYAT mating calculator is free and needs no account to try: pick the sire's colour and the dam's colour and it shows the likely kitten colours and patterns — and, when the pairing leans tabby, it now names which parent is responsible and why. If you remove the golden modifier from a parent and the answer flips to solid, you have just seen the rule on this page with your own cats.