Welcome To The Instructional Breeding Project II

[Charles Courtois]

This time I’d like to discuss 3 commonly used breeding techniques for learning the “mystery” hidden traits that a kitty may have. The 3 techniques I'm referring to are what I call the direct pull, backbreeding, and sibling breeding.

The direct “pull” (I know there are people who don’t like using the word pull in this context, for the quite legitimate reason that you’re not actually pulling the hidden, but simply using a trait that can hide under the starter’s hidden when they toss it, but I can come up with a simple understandable phrase that conveys that, so I’ll stick with “pull” hehe) involves pairing the starter with a partner with very recessive traits of the particular type you're trying to discover. The hope is that the traits from the "puller” are sufficiently recessive to hide behind whatever you're starter is hiding. 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 (in the case of Sydney and Arti, we have already seen that Sydney’s tail, ear and whisker shape traits aren’t recessive enough to hide behind Arti’s hiddens). If your starter hides a trait that is the most recessive of its type (what I call a “top-end-recessive”), you’ll never discover it by this method; you will likely have to use one of the other 2 methods.

Backbreeding involves pairing the offspring of a parent that is known to hide the hidden trait(s) being investigated with the parent, in the hopes that both offspring 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 offspring), and, as long as the hidden trait isn't the same as the offspring'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 & offspring 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 (the two cats are have only a 25% chance of passing the hidden at the same time). Finally, if the hidden trait happens to be the same as the shown trait of the offspring being used to backbreed, you won't get a useful answer, & you'll never find out that you won't get a useful answer from this technique. For example, if Arti hides Curious whiskers, & the choice was made to backbreed the Week 3 Kitten to Arti, we'd either get Guitar whiskers back (if Arti passed her shown whisker shape), or Curious whiskers (if Arti passed her hidden whisker shape), but we wouldn't know if it was the case that Arti's hidden whisker shape was Curious, or that Week 2 Kitten was passing the Curious whisker shape that he would have received from dad Sydney every time Arti 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. I may also use it if I have discovered all but one or two of a starter’s hiddens, and what I have found isn’t highly desirable. In this case, I may use it if I have an offspring hiding the hidden(s) I haven’t determined yet, just to see what happens without investing too much expense. In fact, this is how I discovered Swanky whiskers! The starter that hid them (a 2013 RFL starter named Desyre), had revealed in the first 3 weeks that most of her hiddens were fairly dominant, older traits (Bengal Sorrel, Key Lime eyes, Big Boo Boo tail, and 2-Tone Black and white whiskers). The only traits that Desyre was guaranteed to hide that I had left to discover were the ears and whisker shape. Fortunately, I had a male from her second breeding hiding both the ear and whisker shape, so I unpacked him (his name was MacPherson) and set him to partner with Desyre, not expecting much. On MacPherson’s 2nd breeding with Desyre, both of them passed their hiddens, and Swanky whiskers appeared on the grid for the first time (I would later discover her hidden ear was Boo Boo btw)!

The final technique I’ll talk about is sibling breeding, which involves breeding 2 offspring (I’ll use the abbreviation OS for offspring from now on) of a parent that are both carrying hiddens you are trying to discover together. When both siblings pass their hiddens of those traits, which should be what the starter is hiding. As you will learn later, I’m planning to set one of these up with 2 of Arti’s kittens. The advantages of this technique is that it will generally give more highly-traited kittens than backbreeding), 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 time (which I will probably do with Arti). The primary disadvantage is that it requires 2 decently-traited OS's of opposite genders carrying the same traits (this is why I didn’t set up a sibling breed with Week 1 Kitten and Week 2 Kitten; they weren’t hiding the same hiddens from Arti, and so would have not given me any new information about Arti, as last week’s exercise was intended to show). Also, you'll only likely get info about the traits that both siblings are showing (as I just explained lol).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.

Now let’s look at Week 3 Kitten. Here is her pedigree:



We haven’t learned anything new from this breeding (we already learned from the first 2 weeks that Arti hides at least Curious tail and at least Curious whiskers, and these are the only 2 traits that Arti passed this time). However, that doesn’t mean that this cat isn’t useful. Since This is a male, it can be either backbred to Arti or sibling bred to Week 1 Kitten. Either method has a good chance of giving us an answer on what Arti’s hidden tail is (though if Arti hides Curious tail, it won’t). I’ve opted to sibling breed Week 3 to Week 1, because this allows me to use other breeding methods with Arti. So I’ve unpacked Week 1 and Week 3, and we’ll see what happens.

Exercise: Week 1 + Week 3 isn’t a great sibling breeding combination, but we haven’t had the best luck in terms of Arti passing traits, so sometimes you just have to make do with what you have. What are the minimum and maximum number of traits that Week 1 and Week 3’s kittens will have? Remember that Week one has 18-carat gold eyes, Curious tail and rounded ears, with Genesis traits showing everywhere else. Remember also that the dad of Week1 and Week 3 is a 9-traiter (Sydney). Answer is below.

Please feel free to reply to this thread with comments/questions as you see fit!

Answer: Week 1 Kitten show eye colour, tail and ear traits, but is hiding all 9 traits from 9-traited dad Sydney. Week 3 Kitten show tail and whisker shape traits, but is also hiding all 9 traits from 9-traited dad Sydney. The smallest number of traits this combo will give is if both cats only pass their shown traits wherever they have Genesis-type traits showing. In this case, Week 1 would pass non-Genesis eye colour, tail and ears, and the rest would be Genesis, while Week 3 would pass non-Genesis tail and whisker shape, and the rest would be Genesis. Since Genesis traits are dominant to non-Genesis, the only traits that would end up showing in the OS in this worst-case scenario would be where both pass a shown trait of the same type. In this case, the only shown trait that they have in common is the tail, so that would be the only shown trait in this case. The most traits that Week 1 and Week 3 could pass would be 9 each, since both are hiding all 9 traits, since their dad Sydney is a 9-traiter. In this best-case scenario, their kitten would be a 9-traiter!

Therefore, the answer is minimum 1 trait, maximum 9 traits.