Ticked, Not Tabby: How to Tell an Abyssinian from a Somali

frankchen-sketch — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:02:20 +0000

People mislabel these two breeds constantly, and the reason is fair: the Somali is an Abyssinian with longer hair. Same ticked coat, same wedge head, same athletic build. But "sort of the same" is where most guesses fall apart. Here is how I separate them, and the third cat that ruins both guesses.

The one-hair test comes first

Pull a single hair from the brushing pile and hold it under a phone flashlight. Both breeds carry four to six alternating bands of light and dark color along each hair, darkest at the tip. That is ticking. No stripes across the body, no spots, no patches. If the cat has visible stripes anywhere on the torso, you are looking at a tabby, not either of these breeds.

Coat length is the only fork that matters

Once ticking is confirmed, the split is simple:

Abyssinian: short, fine coat that lies flat against the body. Sleek silhouette, no ruff, no breeches, tail covered in the same short fur ending in a dark tip.

Somali: fine, silky medium-long coat with a full ruff around the neck and a genuinely bushy tail. People reliably describe them as fox-like, and the description sticks because the tail plume does the arguing for you.

The long coat is recessive, which is why Somali litters historically showed up inside Abyssinian breeding programs as surprises. The breeds share nearly everything. Coat length is not a minor detail here, it is the whole classification.

The third cat that ruins both guesses

The Singapura also carries a ticked coat, and at a glance in a shelter cage, ticking reads as "Abyssinian family". The giveaways are size and color ground. A Singapura runs 4 to 8 pounds with a rounder head, larger eyes, and a shorter muzzle. The ground color stays warm buff with brown ticking. Abyssinians run 6 to 11 pounds and range from ruddy through blue, fawn, and silver.

So the quick decision tree: ticked coat confirmed, small and buff means Singapura, medium with flat short coat means Abyssinian, medium with ruff and plume means Somali.

Where shelter labels go generous

"Abyssinian mix" is one of the most handed-out labels in shelters, because ticked or not, a slim athletic brown cat gets called Abyssinian far more often than genetics supports. Residual ticking can survive several generations after a cross, so the label is not always wrong. It is just worth treating the visual check as a first filter. If the breed line matters, for a health question or a cattery purchase, a DNA panel settles what the coat suggests.

The coat tells you most of the story. It just refuses to tell you all of it.

Quick self-check: if you want a second opinion on a photo before you commit to a breed guess, I put together a comparison of cat breed identifier tools at furriq's cat breed identifier comparison — it shows what matched, what was ruled out, and where the confidence sits.

I built a free I Ching divination web app with AI readings (build log)

frankchen-sketch — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:46:37 +0000

A few months ago I got interested in the I Ching (Book of Changes) — not the fortune-telling caricature, but the actual 3,000-year-old divination system with 64 hexagrams and surprisingly coherent philosophy.

The problem: most online I Ching tools are either ad-ridden, require signups, or just show you the raw hexagram text with zero interpretation. So I built The Hexagrams — a free, no-signup I Ching app.

What it does:

Write a question, shake the coin cup (animated, three coins, six lines) — the old-school yarrow/coin method, digitized
Get the hexagram with proper trigram structure, changing lines, and the classical text
An AI reading connects the classical interpretation to your actual question instead of leaving you with cryptic hexagram names

Stack notes for the technically curious:

Static-first Astro site (fast, works on flaky connections)
Coin toss is cryptographically random, not Math.random
All 64 hexagrams ship as structured data — the AI layer only augments the classical text, never replaces it

Design-wise I went for a calm ink-and-paper feel rather than the usual dark-mode-SaaS look. Feedback welcome — especially from anyone who knows the I Ching tradition well and has opinions about how digital divination should (or shouldn't) work.