Brown cats live farther from town while red/white/blue and classic tabby cats tend to stick around is a simplistic summary of the July 2023 study from the journal Ecology & Evolution. Distance from human settlements favors wild-type appearance of feral cats (Felis catus) in Mediterranean woodland by Shahar Dubiner, Itai Namir, Ron, Chen and Eran Levin.
The adaptive coloration more resembling the wild cat, Felis silvestris, and to blend with the vegetative environment are reasons posited by the authors. The ability of predators to identify and prey upon cats with unusual or visually distinctive colorations is suggested by the authors as a reason for the relatively low density of non-brown tabby cats a great distance from human settlements.
The authors also pose visually distinctive color patterns to help distinguish which cats are domestic to humans and create a sense of compassion resulting in greater access to food and reduction in predators. These theories underscore the previous work by researchers demonstrating a higher incidence of color pattern variants among domestic cat populations that enjoy some level of care taken by humans.
