# Colour Question (BSH)



## flosskins (Jan 27, 2010)

Just out of interest, does anybody know what i would be likely to get if I mated a silver tipped girl with a blue boy carrying chocolate?


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## gskinner123 (Mar 10, 2010)

I don't stalk you round the message boards, honest  I always seem to be posting on your threads but it's just because I have BSH too.

The colour/pattern kittens you could expect from that mating depends entirely on what colours/patterns/recessives the parents may/may not carry and, though I'm willing to list all the permutations lol, it'd be a bit long winded to mention them all for now.

Assuming the silver tipped girl has an all silver tipped pedigree (and most do if they're bred by breeders who breed solely that colour) AND assuming, for now, she doesn't carry dilute, nor the chocolate gene then the offspring to a blue boy would 'visibly' appear to be silver spotted. I say 'visibly' because you wouldn't be able to register them as such because neither parent is (as far as GCCF is concerned) a tabby. A tipped has the wide band gene which forces the colour to the ends of each shaft of hair - you lose this effect, to the greater extent, when you cross a tipped with a self and so you, in effect, regain a visible spotted tabby pattern.

If the tipped girl has a more diverse, non-standard black silver tipped pedgiree and she carries dilute (blue), self (non-agouti) or is perhaps not homozygous for silver (i.e. she carries the gene for non-silver) or even if she carries chocolate (unlikely) or, even worse, colourpointed and the sire also carries colourpointed then that's a whole different ball game.


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## flosskins (Jan 27, 2010)

hehe you can stalk my posts all you like as its lovely to be able to ask the questions and get interesting answers!!

Ok, so thats a lot of options. I understand the possible colours, can you please explain why the offspring could not be registered as spotted if thats what they are?

On the same note, what would i register a blue self with a few tabby markings as?

What colours do you breed?


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## Soupie (Sep 2, 2008)

Hi Flosskins

If I were you with your boy I would be looking to get a couple of nice self (or tortie) queens for him - either cream. blue, black, lilac or choc to produce some lovely self or tortie babies.

I am a silver buff and a blue self to a tipped queen is not one I would do in British shorthairs where you are breeding for type and coat colour and pattern. Just my humble opinion though :thumbup:

Soupie x

eta tipped carrying CP is rare although my silver shaded selkirk carries CP from 8 generations back through generations of tipped and shaded cats  Noone knew because noone had mated to a CP carrier .....


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## gskinner123 (Mar 10, 2010)

I'm not very good at explaining things in a nutshell but if you can bear to read! ...

GCCF will only, quite rightly, register kittens as tabby (whether spotted, classic or ticked tabby) if one or both parents are tabby. That's obviously because one of the parents has to be tabby to produce tabby kittens - i.e. you can't get true tabbies from two non-tabby parents.

The confusing and some might say silly bit is this: A tipped cat is, in effect a tabby. You don't see the tabby pattern because you have the wide-band gene involved too. As I mentioned, the wide band gene removes the various 'bandings' of colour on the hair shaft (which you have in tabbies and is responsible for their pattern/markings). So all you actually see on a silver tipped, for instance, is the silver/white undercoat with the pattern forced to the ends of the hairs - tipping. You've doubtless seen young silver tipped kittens or even adults that are poorly marked, i.e. too heavily tipped, and in those cats you can spot the tell-tale tabby markings.

The (somewhat) silly bit is that GCCF don't recognise tipped cats as tabbies and so you cannot register kittens as tabby from a tipped x self mating. Not being a mating I've even undertaken I don't actually know *what* breed number they'd be allocated. But I believe they are registered as tipped and given the same breed number (someone might correct me on this). Though the majority of breeders wouldn't want to include such a kitten in their breeding programme if they speciallised in breeding tabbies; the presence of the wide band gene would be undesirable for them as it would 'muck up' the pattern/density of pattern they were trying to achieve on their tabbies.

A blue self kitten with ghost tabby markings is just registered as a blue self - so long as it is *really* a self! A lot of blue kittens have ghost markings which disappear into adulthood but they can be very persistent where classic tabby is concerned as classic tabby ghost markings tend to be a lot heavier than ghost spotted markings. 

I've bred mostly blues and blue spotted over the years, but also some brown spotted and have done countless matings of blue self x blue spotted; there's really no doubting, right from birth, what is a blue self, what is a blue spotted tabby and what is a blue self with some ghost markings - blue tabbies (whether classic or spotted) have a creamy/mushroom ground colour and a blue pattern - totally different from a blue self with a few markings.


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