White cats with blue eyes are beautiful animals, but they can suffer from a genetic defect that causes them to spend their lives in silence.Most blue-eyed white cats are born deaf. This does not mean that all white cats with blue eyes suffer from the condition, and it does not affect Burmese and Siamese breeds that are very light colored with blue eyes. Many cats with one blue eye and one yellow eye also are prone to deafness. The cause of the deafness is a dominant genetic defect. Every animal has two genes for each trait, one from their mother and one from their father. In this specific deafness, if the mother passes on a gene for deafness and the father passes on a gene for hearing, the deafness gene is dominant and the kitten will not be able to hear. Inside a cat's ear, there is an organ that converts sound waves into electrical impulses that travel to the brain and are processed as sound.
Our beautiful domestic cats come fabulously clothed in hundreds of color, pattern and coat varieties, a pretty amazing feat for a species that developed from a rather drab-looking desert animal.
Deafness is the inability to hear and can be caused by either abnormalities of the ear itself (conduction) or by neurologic abnormalities, which include problems with the inner ear, auditory nerve or in...
A head tilt is a persistent tilt or turn of the head along the animal's central axis to one side or the other and is usually described according to the side of the head that turns down.
Inflammation within the ear can have numerous causes including bacteria, fungi and parasites. Middle ear infections typically occur in association with external ear infections, which can then progress...
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