Welcome To The Instructional Breeding Project II

[Charles Courtois]

When you have breedings where you are trying to discover a hidden trait and don’t get a conclusive answer, there are 2 approaches you can take; you can switch to a more recessive version of that trait or you can switch to a more dominant version. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages.

The approach that is probably more commonly used is to switch to a more recessive version of a trait. For example, suppose that you breed a starter with a cat with a pure Frisky tail, and get an offspring with a Frisky tail back. In this case, I will often switch the starter’s partner to one with a much more recessive tail (for example a tail in the Fussy to Dreamy range), and hope that my choice is sufficiently recessive to hide behind the starter’s hidden tail when it gets passed the next time by the starter. The primary advantage of this approach is that it is likely to give you a quick answer (you have a 50% chance every breeding that the starter will toss its hidden trait, and if the version of the trait that your starter’s partner has is sufficiently recessive, you will get your answer whenever the starter passes its hidden).

There are 2 disadvantages to this approach, however. One is that you won’t get a definitive answer if the starter’s hidden is as recessive or more recessive than that of the partner you used. In the above example, if you use a partner with a pure Fussy tail, and get a Fussy tail back, you won’t know whether the starter hides a Fussy tail, or a more recessive tail (for example Dreamy). The other disadvantage is that if you do get an answer, and the trait is something that you like, you’ll have an impure version of the trait (the trait from the starter will be showing, and a more recessive trait will be hiding), meaning that if you try and breed the OS with other cats in the hopes of getting that trait into other lines, 50% of the time you will get the offspring passing the trait that you want, but 50% of the time it will pass its more recessive hidden instead, which you may not want. In the above example, suppose that you bred the starter with a pure Fussy-tailed partner and got a Stubby-tailed OS back. Suppose that you like Stubby tails, but not Fussy ones. Every time you breed that OS to another cat, 50% of the time it will pass the Stubby that you want it to pass, but the other 50% of the time it will pass Fussy instead.

The other approach is to use a trait that is more dominant than what you used before, and hope that either (1) you get the right gender hiding the trait you seek to discover in order to set up a backbreed, or (2) you get one of each gender hiding the trait in question, in order to set up a sibling breed, or (3) get a cat hiding the trait in question that you can breed to another cat with a recessive version of that trait (i.e. use the previous approach on this OS). Since you have already established that the starter is hiding something more recessive than what you are using, you know that any OS is hiding something distinctly more recessive than what what their partner pass, so you don’t have to worry about the starter hiding the same trait as what her partner has. In the example above, if you followed by putting the starter with a partner with a pure Mysterious tail after the Frisky-tailed partner bred a Frisky-tailed OS, you would know that any Mysterious-tailed OS of that pairing would hide Frisky tail or better; it wouldn’t be hiding a Mysterious tail, since you have already established previously that the starter hides Frisky or more recessive. You can then use any Mysterious-tailed OS’s of the starter-pure Mysterious tail pairing in any of (1), (2), or (3).

This is a much slower approach than the other one, and requires a certain amount of gender luck if you want to proceed with (1) or (2) above ((1) requires getting an OS hiding the trait in question with the opposite gender of the starter, and (2) requires getting OS’s of both genders hiding the trait). The advantage of this approach is that if you take this approach and follow with either (1) or (2) above, and get decent luck, you will eventually get a conclusive answer (both the backbreed in (a) and the sibling breed in (b) require both partners to toss their hidden (a 25% chance)). When that happens, you will also have a pure version of that trait, so that you can count on that OS to pass that trait every time, if it’s a trait that you like.

This discussion will become more relevant when we look at Arti’s new partner for the next breeding, Oliver!

For now though, let’s look at the results from week 5 (it won’t take long, since my run of bad luck continued lol).

This week we have to breedings to consider: one involving Arti and Sydney, and the other involving Week 1 Kitten and Week 3 kitten. First, here’s the result for The Arti-Sydney pairing:



For the fifth straight week, Arti has passed her Genesis fur. These things happen, and are something over which you have absolutely no control. The 2 traits that she did pass are the 2 traits that we have already established that she hides; 18-carat Gold eye colour, and 2 Tone Black & White whisker colour. This kitten will remain in the box, since we can learn nothing new about Arti by breeding it.

Here is the result from the first breeding of Week 1 Kitten with Week 3 Kitten (remember that we set this sibling breed up to try and discover Arti’s hidden tail trait):



This kitten (I’ve called her “Week 5A Kitten”) has 4 traits, but really we’re only interested in whether she shows conclusively what Arti’s hidden tail trait is. In this case, at least one parent (maybe both) passed their shown Curious tail(s), so we got a Curious tail showing on this kitten (of course, we have to keep in mind that it is possible that Arti is hiding a Curious tail, and that both Week 1 and Week 3 have pure Curious tails- there’s nothing we can do about that, but it is important to remember that). We will keep this kitten boxed for now.

Exercise: Week 5A Kitten also has a non-Genesis eye colour, ears and whisker. What are the hidden eye colour, ears, and whisker colour of Week 5A Kitten? Remember that her only grandfather Sydney has pure Mercury eyes, pure Rounded ears, and pure Black whiskers. Answer at the end of the post.

In other words, no new info from either of the week 5 breedings. We still know that Arti is hiding:
18-carat Gold eye colour,
Curious tail or more recessive,
Rounded ears or more recessive,
2-Tone Black and White whisker colour, and
Curious whisker shape or more recessive.
Since Arti is a starter, she will also be hiding some non- Genesis fur (which Arti hasn’t passed in the first 5 breedings).

For next week, I’m going to switch up Arti’s partner! Let’s take a look at Arti’s new partner, Oliver:



Oliver is a very good starter partner (in fact, I had him with one of my Falloween starters for the past 2 weeks). His fur is not only retired, but it is the most recessive retired fur at this time (which makes it my favourite fur to breed with starters), Balinese Cream Lynx. He has a 2/3 chance of hiding a Curious tail, but other than that and possibly (a small chance) Twinkle shade hiding, he should be pure traits. His Swanky whiskers are the third most recessive whisker currently, and thus his whisker shape is quite likely to directly reveal Arti’s hidden whisker shape. His show tail and ears are both clearly dominant to Arti’s hidden tail and ears, giving us the potential to eventually set up a backbreed or sibling breed to breed out pure versions of Arti’s tail and ears. Of course, he’s a 9-traiter, and has some pretty great traits, so any OS of hise is going to at least hide great traits. We’ll soon see what we can learn from pairing him with Arti! ?

But what is going to happen with Sydney now? I have a special project for him! The Falloween Oliver was partnered with (a Monster Mash named Moina) previously is known to hide Odyssey Cognac Wine eyes. Sydney is known to have pure Mercury eyes (as was discussed in a previous post). Therefore, I am going to breed Sydney with Moina, and when Moina passes her hidden Odyssey Cognac Wine eye, I will know conclusively whether that eye is dominant or recessive to Mercury! Mercury is a good, mid-range recessive eye to compare to Odyssey Cognac Wine, so Sydney will help advance our knowledge of that eye!

That’s it for now…good luck with your Falloweens!

Answer: Week 5A’s hidden eye is Mercury (Week 3 Kitten’s hidden eye which he got from Sydney (Week 1 Kitten passed her shown 18-carat Gold). Week 5A’s whisker colour is pure Black as both of her parents passed the Black whiskers they got from Sydney. The ears are a more complicated matter. We know that since Week 3 shows Genesis ears, he got Genesis from Mom Arti and Rounded from Sydney (Sydney has pure Rounded ears). So we can assume that the shown ears came from Week 3 Kitten, and that Week 5A’s hidden ear trait came from Week 1 Kitten. Week 1 Kitten either passed her shown Rounded ears (which came from Sydney) or her hidden ears, which she got from Arti (which are unknown, but Rounded or more recessive). So Week 5A Kitten’s hidden ear trait is Rounded or more recessive.