Welcome To The Instructional Breeding Project II

[Charles Courtois]

First of all, let me mention that the cats and info, plus a tutorial by Wendi, are rezzed and available to look at at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/At.../189/127 .

Arti and Sydney produced their first box late on Thursday. As you’ll see later, it is an interesting box, but before we take a close look at it, I’d like to talk a bit more about choosing partners for your starters.

Making smart choices when picking partners for your starters is crucial in order to make sure you get the best results that you can from your starters, both in learning as much about them as you can, as well as getting their most desirable traits (assuming they have any) into your breeding programs.

I like to use what I call “second-best 9-traiters” with my starters. What I mean by that is that I look for the most recessive traits in my cattery (or that I feel I can acquire fairly easily), and then I choose 9-traiters whose traits are just a bit more dominant than that to breed with my starters. For example, if the most recessive tail my cats have is Puff, my preferred shown (and ideally hidden, though you may not know what all of your cats are hiding) tail trait in a cat for pairing with a starter would be something in the range of Tiger Curl to Posh. Of course, you may not have 9-traiters that carry all of your second-best traits (I know I don’t lol), but that is the ideal that I aim for, and I try to use 9-traiters that are as close to that ideal as possible.

I like to use relatively recessive traits to breed with my starters, at least in the early stages, for 2 reasons. First of all, recessive traits are more likely than more dominant traits, to hide behind whatever the starter’s hidden traits are when you breed kittens, allowing you to learn the starter’s hidden traits as quickly as possible. The other reason is that you know that the kitten will be at least hiding the traits from the starter’s partner. The better the starter’s partner’s traits, the better resulting kittens will be, and the easier it will be for those kittens to be productive additions to your cattery.

At this point, you’re probably wondering why I don’t use my most recessive traits with my starters. It has to do with what I call the “recessiveness wall”. If you use the most recessive trait you have available from your non-starters, then breed with the starter and get that trait showing in the resulting kitten, it’s hard to find out whether your starter is hiding the same trait as the non-starter has, or something more recessive. The resulting kitten won’t be a great choice to backbreed, simply because, if it happens to hide the same trait as the non-starter shows, you will never find out from backbreeding, since you’ll never know whether it’s simply a case of the kitten tossing its shown trait all of the time, or if the kitten is pure-traited. For example, suppose that you breed a starter with an Aby Dark Chocolate-furred kitty (Aby Dark Chocolate is the most recessive known fur at the time of this post), and the kitten is showing Aby Dark Chocolate. You backbreed the kitten to the starter, and all of the kittens show either the Starter’s Genesis fur or Aby Dark Chocolate. Does the starter hide Aby Dark Chocolate, or does it hide an even more recessive fur, with the kitten backbred to it tossing its shown fur Aby Dark Chocolate every time the starter tossed its hidden? We have no way of knowing! Your best course of action in this case is to not use that kitten to backbreed, and instead reach for a cat with a more dominant fur to put with the starter, wait for the right kittens to either sibling breed or backbreed to the starter, and then wait for the sibling breed/ backbreed to breed out the starter’s hidden trait. This will work, but it will take a lot of time.

My preference is to use a second or third most recessive trait I possess, and if I get that trait back, then pull out my most recessive and use it on the starter, keeping the kitten from the previous parent with the more dominant trait as a potential backbreeding/ sibling breeding option. You might not learn as quickly if it is a near-top-recessive quite as fast as if you used your most recessive trait available, but that time lost isn’t as valuable as the time lost from not being able to learn that your starter hid a new most recessive. So, if I want to discover a starter’s hidden fur, my approach of choice is to use something like a Bali Cream Lynx (the most recessive retired fur, so it can’t be hiding in a starter), and if the resulting kitten shows Bali Cream, then I will pull out the Aby Dark Chocolate to put with my starter and see what happens.

It’s time to check out the project’s first box!

Here it is:



Exercise: List Week 1 Kitten’s hidden traits (answer to follow).

Week 1 Kitten (which is still boxed for the moment- more on that later) is showing 3 non-genesis traits (eye colour, tail and ears); the rest of the shown traits are genesis. Since Dad (Sydney) is a 9-traiter, we know that Week 1 Kitten is hiding all 9 traits, that any shown Genesis traits come from starter mom Arti, and since we know quite a bit about Sydney, we have a pretty good idea of what most of Week 1 Kitten’s hiddens are.

Let’s examine the 3 shown non-genesis traits and see what we can figure out.

Eye Colour: Week 1 Kitten’s has is 18-carat Gold eye colour. Non-starter dad Sydney’s shown Mercury eye is recessive to 18-carat Gold. Therefore the 18-carat Gold eye colour must have come from starter mom Arti, and since Arti’s shown eye is Genesis Meadow, 18-carat Gold must be her hidden eye colour trait.

Tail: Week 1 Kitten has a Curious tail. That means that the shown tail trait is Curious, and the hidden tail trait is Curious or more recessive. If we look at dad Sydney, he also has a Curious tail, which should be pure. That means that the shown tail trait came from dad Sydney, and the hidden tail trait (which could possibly also be Curious) came from mom Arti. Arti’s shown tail trait is Genesis, which can’t hide behind Curious, so Arti’s hidden tail trait must be Curious or better, and is a mystery we’ll have to solve in the coming weeks!

Ears: Week 1 Kitten has a Rounded ears. That means that the shown ear trait is Rounded, and the hidden ear trait is Rounded or more recessive. If we look at dad Sydney, he also has a Rounded ears, which should be pure. That means that the shown ear trait came from dad Sydney, and the hidden ear trait (which could possibly also be Rounded) came from mom Arti. Arti’s shown ear trait is Genesis, which can’t hide behind Rounded, so Arti’s hidden tail trait must be Rounded or better, and is another mystery to be solved in the weeks to come!

It is tempting to unpack this box, pull out a male kitty with a recessive tail and ears to put with her, and find out what the hidden ears and tail are that way, or to switch Arti’s partner to one with a more recessive ear and tail (which would be the better way to go), but I think I’ll wait for the moment and see what we can learn about some of Arti’s other hidden traits from a couple of more breedings with Sydney first, and then decide the best course of action from there.

To sum up, from the first week’s breeding, we now know that starter Arti hides 18-carat Gold eye colour, Curious tail or more recessive, and Rounded ears or more recessive.

All in all, an exciting result for the first week. I hope you learn a lot from this thread, and feel free to leave comments/ questions here if you so desire! Stayed tuned to see what happens next week!

Exercise Answer: Week 1 kitten hides either Abyssinian Fawn or Siamese Flame fur, Mercury eyes, Mysterious eye shape, Small pupil, Flair or Glitter shade, Curious tail or more recessive, Rounded ears or more recessive, Black whiskers, and Curious whisker shape. The hidden tail and ear traits come from mom Arti, the rest of the hidden traits come from dad Sydney.