White Cats With Blue Eyes Are Usually Deaf
Deafness is caused by an absence of a cell layer in the inner ear that originates from the same stem cells as well.
White cats with blue eyes are usually deaf. The deaf ear is usually on the same side as the blue eye. Many people wonder if deafness in cats with blue eyes or in white cats is an old wives tale or a fact. The blue eyes in a piebald or epistatic white cat indicates a lack of tapetum.
These cats are three to five times more likely to be deaf than white cats with non-blue eyes. First of all it can be said that not all white cats are deaf but they are more likely to be deaf since they carry the so-called gene W White of white in English especially those that have one eye of each color or blue eyes. Can a cat with blue eyes be deaf.
The notion that blue-eyed white cats are deaf comes from many cats with Waardenburg syndrome being solid white with blue eyes. Why are white cats with blue eyes usually deaf. No this is not always the case.
Interestingly if a white cat with one blue eye is deaf in only one ear that ear will invariably be on the same side of the head as the blue eye. Furthermore if a cat has one blue eye and one green the ear on the side of the blue eye is more likely to be deaf than the other. Statistically white cats with blue eyes with congenital deafness make up around 1 to 15 of the total cat population.
While there is a clear correlation between the blue eye color and deafness in white cats why is this so. In odd-eyed white cats the ear on the blue-eyed side may be deaf but the one on the orange-eyed side usually has normal hearing. Of white cats with one blue eye about 40 percent are deaf in at least one ear.
First of all it can be said that not all white cats are deaf but they are more likely to be deaf since they carry the so-called gene W White of white in English especially those that have one eye of each color or blue eyes. So not all white cats are deaf and not all blue-eyed white cats are deaf but a great many of them are so-affected. Strangely blue eye white cats tend to be deaf even more than others.