KittyCatS! Community Forum

Coming from breeding Amaretto I focused in the first weeks on the number of traits at the cats.
But soon I realised that the number of traits is only half of the story, if not less.
After time of reading about dominant and recessive I now think the difficulty is to breed recessive traits and I started to think about a way to score how recessive a trait and the sum of all traits of a cat is. So I started my spread sheet and begun to calculate :-)

My idea on rating the traits is: Fur 30% / Eyes(colour) 30% / Shade; Tail; Ears; Whiskers and Whiskers Shape 8% each (half shown and half hidden trait, so fur is 15 + 15)

Mathematics (Eyes as an example): I use the dominance list from Saga. I divide the %-number by the number of different eyes, lets say 75, this means 15/75=0.2 This way one step in direction of recessive counts 0.2, the most recessive eye will always be 15 and a cat with all the most recessive traits in the list will be 100 (like 100% recessive).

Now my questions: Does it make sense to do such an „index“ ? If so, is the above mentioned %-allocation ok or should it be different ? I am aware that the „index“ of a cat can change with every change of the list, so with every new eye, fur etc, but these changes will not be dramaticly.

Looking forward to your opinions (sorry for my English, I am not native English)

Cuwi

From a mathematical standpoint on dominance/recessive I view it more in how often is the trait thrown and by matched to what.

Example for me would be shades as that's a current project I'm working on and for as far back as I can go on one side it's natural shade and then on the 7th generation back I run into glitter for a few generations. Now I am incorporating shade into it and picked blush because so far throughout these generations despite breeding with shaded cats I not once got one with a shade. But I was pairing with porcelain or glitter. Now I have one not so traited with blush shade and I kid you not 2 out of 3 breeds I have gotten twinkle on the offspring.

So my equation (just on the traits I like so far) is dominant/shown=1/recessive hidden=0 for appearance on the list, then by the percentage I see when matched with certain traits. As you'll tell breeding for some traits seem to be thrown more often than others. Some traits seem to stay as hiddens versus if it's shown. Ody Bellini was a bear for me to pull as a hidden but once shown I got it all the time even on breeding with more dominant eyes that hid it. While on the same front I tried to help someone that had a cat hiding tapestry organica and all I ever got was the dominant on that cat hiding my ody bellini. So I kid you not right now I am breeding siamese chocolates with dusky diamond eyes, full siblings showing those. Out of 5 offsprings all 5 have the fancie dusky, but 3 are balinese creams which is 3 generations back. My opinion is it depends on the trait and what you are matching it with along with is it showing or hidden. Then throw to up your percentage of success if you have 2 compatible cats, which is why I think kittycest and backbreeding works so well.

But again thats my two cents and I'm sticking to it.

I have been thinking about some sort of index for a couple-three years now.

No. It does not make sense.

Why?

Because, which it makes perfectly good sense, today, it does not perform as intended over time.

There are two main ways to handle change.

First, is to re-indexed everything. But that means you'll have to make it so everyone, newbies included, understands why a cat with a score of 20 (out of 100) suddenly has a score of 12 when nothing about the cat changed. (This is the method you've chosen)

Second is to move the goal. But that means you'll have to make it so everyone understand why a cat with a score of 20 (out of 100, yesterday) is the same cat with a score of 20 (out of 167, today) [Or, put another way, tjhe "same-value-point" of yesterday's 20-point cat is, today, 33 or 34 points and a 'purrfect' cat of 100 points yesterday is now sub-standard and the new 'purrfect' is 167 points.] (This method is the same, it just hides the "gotcha" so a different group of people complain about it.)

The problem? KittyCatS add and retire trait values.

For an "index" to work, KittyCatS needs to stop doing that.