Creating A New Breed?

[The-Wolf]

purely hypothetical

If I was interested in creating a new breed of cat, how would you go about it?

I suspect selecting the parents would be the first step...

say I selected the chinese mountain cat Felis bietias one parent and say an egyptian mau (Felis cattus) as another.
would it matter which was the male and which was the female (wild cat as male, domestic as female)?
would you get two different 'lines' if you went the other way (wild cat as female, domestic as male)?

would you need at least 2 non-related sets of parents to get a viable gene pool or more?


I look forward to your interesting and proberbly complex replies

 

[The-Wolf]

bump

 

[Ryefish]

cant help out with the genetics just yet (give me a few months ), but i know there are laws regarding half-wild breeds. The offspring would also retain the wild genes and be skittish and not be as tame as you probably think they would be lol

 

[atuin]

purely hypothetical

If I was interested in creating a new breed of cat, how would you go about it?

I suspect selecting the parents would be the first step...

say I selected the chinese mountain cat Felis bietias one parent and say an egyptian mau (Felis cattus) as another.
would it matter which was the male and which was the female (wild cat as male, domestic as female)?
would you get two different 'lines' if you went the other way (wild cat as female, domestic as male)?

would you need at least 2 non-related sets of parents to get a viable gene pool or more?


I look forward to your interesting and proberbly complex replies

male/female - depends on few factor including size of newborn, interaction between 2 breeds. Best and safest would be for example choosing female of bigger breed to avoid complications.

outcome from such combination is "bit" more complicated due to multiple genes responsible for things like coat or body shape. one combination of parents can give you various types of hybrids due to quite random mix of parent chromosomes ending up in outcome hybrids.
Usualy while thinking about creating new breed you look after specific outcome (fenotype) and that involves bit more than breading 2 species Its closer to creating new colour version of guppies for example - involves quite few generations of cross and in-breeding combined with luck and tons of time especialy when you want to work on species with quite long birth to mating period. Other thing is that it takes time and quite a lot of generations to stabilise new breed once you get satisfying results.

small introduction to cat genetics could be found http/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_body_type_genetic_mutations
and http/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_coat_genetics