Bumblebliss Wrote:When does a cat become pure? Or is it a myth that it can indeed be pure? So this cat in its 12th generation with all the traits being steady except for the shape of the whisker make it pure? The color remains black, just the shape still changes. Or is it when everything, including this final shape of the whisker, is the exact same through XX generations that you call it that?
Cats can absolutely be provably pure. But often the pedigrees we see show
maybe or
probably pure.
It seems that more people used to understand the difference between "line-bred" and "pure-bred" cats. Now I see lots of advertisements for "purebred" cats where the pedigrees given as "proof" aren't proof of anything more than line-breeding. You have to see the trait pop out from under a more dominant trait in a sibling breed or other breeding where the hidden variables are controlled in order to know that it is pure.
Okay so you have a line - a gorgeous line - of jade black bengals with the black whiskers.
And your line
May indeed be pure (except for the whisker shape). And with each generation of line breeding there is the chance that the father and mother will both throw their dominant traits and that any lurking hidden trait will be eliminated. But you can't
know if it's pure this way. You can only find out somewhere down the road that it
isn't pure if - say two cats hiding latte throw them and you get the double recessive throw. As Devilness said, a trait can lurk for a long time, as porcelain did for a year with her without popping out.
What you can do, though it is labor-intensive, is Make a line pure. People used to do this more often earlier in KittyCatS and perhaps it was easier to do with fewer traits. So you take your gorgeous bengal, and carefully pick or breed a different cat with your desired whisker that has a MORE dominant color, like 2 tone, and then pull the black out from under the 2 tone. Few people care to do this since it endangers the other traits and you risk losing the black. In other words, sometimes you need to break a line to make a pure line.
There are more nuances to explaining this I'm sure, but that's a quick explanation.
Edit: Kayla and I posted at the same time, so I didn't see her post before, but she's got the nitty gritty.
