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are "Shades" completely random?
Hello, old Second Lifer but new to KittyCats and new to the forum ...
I have been trying to breed a plain, realistic looking black cat, because realism in Second Life is my main thing, but it's not working out so far.
I got a bunch of black cats that are as close to what I wanted as I could find and now I'm breeding them to try and accentuate the traits I want and de-emphasise or weed out the traits that I *don't* want.
I understand the basic rules of heredity, but the problem is that my first attempt seems to have violated those rules specifically in the area of "Shades." Since Shades aren't talked about much in terms of breeding, and aren't included in the KittyCat generator, I'm left wondering ... can Shades be bred for at all? Or are they completely random "gotchas"?
Example:
I bred two Russian Blacks with a "natural" shade, knowing full well that one of the parents of each had the same natural shade and one of the parents of each had a "fancy shade." The mother's mother was a "Glitter" and the father's father was a "Blush." Everything else in the family tree is just Natural shading all the way.
What I was expecting was that my two "Natural" parents could possibly have a recessive "Blush" or "Glitter" but that the odds were good that it would be a Natural anyway. Based on what I understand about the rules of heredity in KittyCats, it's impossible for the the recessive trait, if it showed up at all, to be anything other than "Glitter" or "Blush" but what I got was a "Flash."
"Flash" shows up nowhere in the family tree at all and I can go back for generations without seeing anything but 90% "Naturals." So while I'm extremely suspicious that anything other than "Natural" showed up in the first place (the odds would seem to be against it), it also seems quite impossible for it to be a "Flash."
What's going on here? Are Shades hereditary at all or are they just some kind of random flaw in the process?
All I want is a black cat that looks like a black cat and doesn't have a shine or a tint applied to it.
Thanks for reading this far (if you did, lol),
Dianne Mechanique
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