It's great that this breeding produced a boy, and one that matches well with the girl from week 2 too.
I think this is a good time to discuss 3 common breeding techniques for learning the hard-to-determine hidden traits of a starter (or any cat, for that matter). The 3 techniques I'm referring to are the direct pull (I know some people hate using the word "pull" here, but I need a short, simple phrase & this is the best I could come up with in my tired state lol), backbreeding, and sibling breeding.
The direct pull involves pairing the starter with a partner with very recessive traits of the particular type you're trying to discover. That is what Wendi is planning by bringing Sammy in; he has a very recessive (and retired) fur, a decently recessive whisker colour, and a very recessive whisker shape. The idea is that the traits from the "puller" will likely hide behind whatever you're starter is hiding (and if they don't, then you probably have something really nice hehe). The biggest advantage of his technique is that it is most likely to give a direct answer quickly of the 3 techniques mentioned here (if the traits used are recessive enough, a 50% chance per breeding per trait, as opposed to a 25% chance for the other techniques). The primary disadvantage of this is that it requires access to cat of the right gender with the right recessive traits, which can be a problem (and possibly an expense). Also, if the trait(s) on the cat being used aren't recessive enough, you'll never get a direct answer ( for example, if Sammy's whiskers are pure Black whiskers, breeding Poppy with Sammy would never tell us if she hid Latte whiskers; only that she hid at least Black).
Backbreeding involves pairing the offspring (OS for short) of a parent that is known to hide the hidden trait(s) being investigated with the parent, in the hopes that both OS and parent pass their hidden traits, which will be the same, telling you exactly what the parent is hiding. The primary advantages of this approach is that it doesn't require searching for & buying a new cat (since it utilizes an OS), and, as long as the hidden trait isn't the same as the OS's shown trait, will give you a definite answer (assuming both cats pass their hiddens at the same time at some point). The disadvantages are that, unless both the parent & OS have a lot of shown traits (and obviously, if a starter is involved, the starter will have no shown traits), the resulting kittens will likely be low-traited. Also, it is likely to take longer to get an answer than a direct pull would take. Finally, if the hidden trait happens to be the same as the shown trait of the OS being used to backbreed, you won't get a useful answer, & you'll never find out that you won't get a useful answer unless it comes out by another technique. For example, if Poppy hides Black Russian, & the choice was made to backbreed the week 3 kitten to Poppy, we'd either get the gen fur back (if Poppy passed her shown fur), or Black Russian (if Poppy passed her hidden fur), but we wouldn't know if it was the case that Poppy's hidden fur was Black Russian, or that the starter got Ricky's shown fur & was passing it every time Poppy passed her hidden, or both. I tend to use backbreeding as a technique of last resort, when I simply don't have the right cat available for a direct pull.
The final technique I sibling breeding, which involves breeding 2 OS's of a parent that are both carrying hiddens you are trying to discover together. When both siblings pass their hiddens of those traits, that should be what the starter is hiding. This is what Wendi is planning to do once the week 2 & week 3 OS's are old enough to breed. The advantages of this technique is that it will generally give more highly-traited kittens than backbreeding ( breeding the week 2 & week 3 OS's together will yield 4T kittens minimum, with the possibility of as many as 9T), so you're more likely to get useful cats this way. Also, since this technique doesn't use the starter directly, you can use one of the other 2 techniques at the same (this is what Wendi is planning; using Sammy for the direct pull & sibling breeding the week 2 & week 3 kittens). The primary disadvantage is that it requires 2 decently-traited OS's of opposite genders carrying the same traits (you won't likely get much out of breeding a 5T OS with a 4T OS if most of the traits shown by the 4T aren't the same one the 5T is showing), which depends quite a bit on luck hehe. Also, you'll only likely get info about the traits that both siblings are showing (for example, we aren't likely to get info about Poppy's hidden whisker shape from breeding the week 2 & week 3 starters together).The other thing is that you could run into the same problem as you would with backbreeding if the parent's hidden is the same as the OS's shown. Because sibling breeding still allows using the other techniques, I will use it whenever I have decent siblings to breed, & use either a direct pull or backbreed with the starter at the same time.
Hopefully this has helped give an understanding of what techniques to use when. Please feel free to respond with your questions & suggestions.
Instructional Breeding Project (Week 7 Info: MEGA!)
