Welcome To The Instructional Breeding Project III

[Charles Courtois]

Let's see what starter Meridel's seventh breeding (her second with Amaud) has to tell us. Keep in mind that we know everything about Meridel's hidden traits, except for her 2 whisker traits, and whether she hides a shade other than Natural (I'm not really concerned about whether the shade is hiding, but it's a bonus if we get one). Here is the pedigree for Week 7 Kitten:



Week 7 Kitten is showing 4 non-genesis traits. We already know Meridel's non-genesis hiddens for 3 of these traits (Serenity eye colour, Mysterious eye shape and Mysterious ears). Let's take a closer look at the other trait Week 7 Kitten is showing:

Whisker Colour: Week 7 Kitten is showing Black whiskers. Non-starter Amaud has Latte whiskers showing. According to Saga's charts, Latte is recessive to Black, so Amaud can't be hiding Black whiskers. Therefore, Week 7 Kitten must have got her shown Black whiskers from Meridel, so Meridel must be hiding Black whiskers.

This result isn't terribly unexpected. In previous weeks with her original partner Lin, Meridel passed her hidden whisker colour a few times, and every time, a Black whisker ended up showing. Since Lin showed Black whiskers and hides at least Chocolate, we couldn't rule out him passing Black whiskers every time (one of the reasons we switched to Amaud), but there was a good chance that he passed his hidden whisker colour at least once. Since all of his kittens with Meridel that showed non-Silver whiskers showed Black, I suspected that she hid Black, but I still had to prove it by breeding Meridel to a cat that had whiskers that were clearly recessive to Black.

So now there's only one unknown hidden among the hidden traits that Meridel is known to hide: her whisker shape. This is a bit more of a mystery than the whisker colour was, since she has only passed her hidden whisker shape once in her first 7 breedings. Hopefully she passes it again in week 8!

To summarize what we know about Meridel's non-genesis hiddens after this week's result: Meridel hides Chateau Cat - Grey & White No. 2 fur, Serenity eyes, Mysterious eye shape, Small pupils, Mysterious tail, Mysterious ears, Black whisker colour, and a Curious or more recessive whisker shape.