KittyCatS! Community Forum

I have a quick question thats been in the back of my mind for awhile about breeding:
In order to be appropriate to say if the cat is showing a pure trait or not does this trait have to be from all four parents in ped meaning parents or grandparents or can you label it as a pure trait if its just from just the mom and dad and excluding the grand parents?

Thank you all so much for your help

"Pure" is often badly misused.

It means "both the shown/dominant and hidden/recessive are" but the use most people put it it is more like "I think it is pure, but I cannot prove it and it might not be". All of the examples you give are of this later case.

The "True Recessive" is, by definition, "Pure". For some traits, such as Eye Shape and Pupil Size, the True Recessive is fixed. Small Pupil Size is, by it's very definition "pure" and no further proof is needed. Fur and Eye Color, though, for example, don't have a fixed True Recessive. They have what we think if the CURRENT True Recessive; but we can never be sure, and we know it changes occasionally.

Proving "pure" is a logical process where you show the hidden/recessive for a box/cat cannot be anything other than the shown/dominant.

The common mistake it believing that simply because the parents, grand-parents, or great-grandparents, or ANY number of generations back you care to look all show the same dominant trait value, the offspring must be "pure". This is not the case! It is "probably pure" but you must always remember, this is not proof .. it's a probabilistic statement .. the odds are good, it is "pure" but it might not be.

You can always be 100% certain a trait is pure if you “hit” the most recessive trait in that category. For example, if you were to breed a cat with small pupils than you can be 100% certain that the gene is pure (small-small) for if it were not, then the shown pupil size of the cat would be large instead of small. The same is true for other traits such as fur, for example. You could only ever know that the trait is pure if you managed to breed a cat with the most recessive fur type on the grid (if you knew what that was.)

However, in some other cases, you cannot be totally 100% sure. Your confidence may rise if, after breeding generation after generation, you always obtained the same offspring. However, this is no indication that the trait is pure. It could be that one out of the parents is homogenous (AA) and the other is heterogeneous (Aa). There would be no way for you to tell which is which. All their offspring would show a common trait, however, half would be hetreogenous (Aa) and the half would be homogenous (AA). Again, you would never know which is which. You might pick a pair of the offspring to breed for a further generation and mistakenly believe that you had indeed gained a pure strain (simply because you had selected a AA and Aa in your choice by error.) Again, half of these offspring would be “impure” (Aa) and each time you constructed another breeding pair, you could very easily be using one pure (AA) and one impure (Aa) parent.

This explains why, sometimes, a breeder may get a 100% success rate with their breeding programme for many generations and then, after selecting a new pair of cats for a further generation, a more recessive fur is given. It was simply that each time they were using a pair of cats for breeding, one was pure (AA) and one was not (Aa). That meant that every offspring had a 50% chance of being impure. In the end, they had simply picked two of these impure offsprings (Aa and Aa by a fluke) as a new breeding generation and gained a recessive-recessive gene (aa) instead.

well that most definitely clears that up wow thanks a million for that priceless info!

(03-20-2014 12:00 PM)Maxwell Grantly Wrote: [ -> ]You can only ever be totally and utterly 100% certain a trait is pure if you “hit” the most recessive trait in that category.

Wrong. It's actually not that hard (given luck) to produce a "pure". A lot of people probably do it by accident, in fact.

Contrary to popular belief, in fact, the Pedigree tree for your provably pure trait will rarely be littered with that trait. In fact, it may not even appear at all (except on the pure box) and you'll need to show its parent's or grandparent's (or even further back) to prove it.

That certainly sounds quite interesting to consider, thanks so much for sharing that!

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Im gonna start ped pictures in all the clouds the kitties sit on in my 12 stores ( im just reducing from 16 locations but i basically have one on every sim now)
When you touch it's cloud it will hand you a folder with all the relative ped pics in it, i already offer this kinda gadget for free in all my stores i use it as a LM giver but it's free to copy in my stores im just gonna drop the script inside into the clouds them drop there pics in then maybe sum floaty text on a few so ppl get the idea to click em. i hope it helps with marketing and all, i know many many times when out shopping for kitties i had wished i had ped pics of the grandparents and such. In the end the effort will probably be the same amount of time as labeling the boxes which i think im just gonna skip altogether not only time consuming but too easy to make mistakes and wastes everyone time. I just hope this will actually help the customers in their shopping experience instead of naming them cause the extra effort also now goes to them in that they will have to click the cloud pillow to see any relavant info on this kitty, but i guess no more effort than having to click the pedigree giver itself. saves prims too having it in the cloud pillow as its part of my theme and decor.

If you're looking at "All my parents were ..." or "All my parents and grandparents were ..." or "For 259 generations, every ancestor was ..." (which are the sort of statements the OP was after) then you are quite correct, it is not possible to be 100% certain. No matter how many ancestors, for any number of generations, there will always remain a probability that something else lurked and still does.

However, you CAN with 100% certainty, determine the hidden/recessive trait value for some cats based upon their genetic heritage.

If, for example, that determination shows the hidden/recessive for BOTH parents was the shown trait for their box, you are 100% certain that box is "pure". Note: neither parent showed the box's trait .. this is exactly opposite of the OP's Pedigree statements, does NOT require the parents only hide the current true recessive, and does NOT require the box be birthed.

A Simple Example:

Mom1: Genesis Coco III
Mom2: Foxie Salt & Pepper Mask
Dad1: Genesis Diamond III
Dad2: Snowshoe Cream

Box1 (Mom1 x Dad2): Russian White (hiding Snowshoe Cream or better). Therefor Mom1 hides Russian White, exactly, 100% certain.
Box2 (Mom2 x Dad1): Russian White (hiding Foxie Salt & Pepper Mask or better). Therefore Dad1 hides Russian White, exactly, 100% certain.
Box3 (Mom1 x Dad1): Russian White (hiding Russian White). Box3 is proven "pure" with 100% certainty. Russian White is NOT the current True Recessive. All ancestors are Starters. NONE of the ancestors show Russian White.

Thank you for clarifying that Tad. I appreciate your feedback. (I'll remove the error from my above post - thank you.)

This is a topic that has interested me because, having gained our previous target of obtaining 9T vampire kittens, the next project of Skippy and I was to produce a vampire kitten that was pure in all its nine traits. We decided to inbreed again and again to try and whittle out any stubborn recessive genes and we have been doing this for many generations now. Each generation we would swap out a male, keep producing boxes and wait until we obtain a female and then use her to swap with the parent. Then we would repeat the process. Skippy and I have been doing this many times, swapping males and females alternatively in an attempt to weed out recessive genes by a process of chance.

This is a very long process and one that relies on chance only. However, once a gene is weeded out, it will never return. Interestingly, I was looking through my cattery and saw a page of vampires with all seven cats identical in every trait (Four grandparents, two parents and the cat itself) and so I wondered what the probability was that the cat was pure in (for example) its fur. I was surprised, when I crunched the numbers, to discover that, after all this work, the probability of the cat being homogenous in its fur type was only sixteen out of thirty-two - that was just a half!

Please excuse my rough notes below - the following page was my working out.



(Explanation for above scribbles: Each of the four grandparents are heterogeneous (Aa) and so there is a one in three chance that their offspring are homogenous. (We can discount the "aa" offspring from the maths for we know that the recessive fur is not showing.) When combining these three different combinations for the two parents, 16 homogenous offspring are produced. Again, we can again discount the four "aa" results because we can see from the pedigree page that no cat has a recessive fur type. This means that there are (9*4)-4 different combinations.)

I was surprised to see that, despite having a whole page of identical traits, the final cat only has mathematically a 50-50 chance of being pure in the given trait.

I see that Skippy and I are going to have to continue with this for many many more generations to come!

The only cats i ever advertise as Pure, are the line i bread out form 2 starters, i can show the two furs hidden and the same goes for all 7 traits that i now have shown on my line. When you get a cat form another breeder it can be hard for sure to determine what is pure. Sometimes you get an oddball, like a flash shade when NONE of the cats or cats parents etc show that it is there. I had a pure Genisis Coco 2 drove me crazy lol, i thought i HAD to hide something and nope it got the gen fur form both parents