Snowshoe Scotties - My First Selective Breed
Sept 21, 2022 11:46:50 GMT -5
Ratqueen, Megan@Xoops ❄️, and 12 more like this
Post by KeyGlyph on Sept 21, 2022 11:46:50 GMT -5
Hey everyone! I'm 95% lurker, 5% poster, but I wanted to crawl out of the shadows for a moment to share a major project that I'm quite proud of: my first selective breed!
As coined by my husband, these are Snowshoe Scotties. Their tables are full Scottie except for their markings, which are fully Chihuahua. Above are four siblings who each express a different number of their eponymous shoes, just to showcase a little variety. (I do also consider shoeless Scotties of the proper genotype with confirmed shoed siblings to be a part of the breed, but they are their own subtype: Barefoot Snowshoe Scotties. )
Other optional marking variations include nose blazes, chi eyebrows, and white/tan chest patches. The real joy in the project for me, though, has been the eye color mutations, and in getting to know Scotties in general. Before I started this project, I'd never adopted one! Not one Scottie in my 20+ years of playing the game. My findings: they are feisty and delightful.
I began this project last year while I was deep in grief for our cat Venus, who lost her battle with cancer that May. I was desperate to lose myself in some kind of forever pursuit, and selective breeding seemed like a good candidate. I was heavily inspired by RogueRowan's work, but tried to keep my goal simple.
Then I decided to keep them NIB, because I thought maybe I was going too simple.
Well.
Here's a visual of how I wound up organizing my family lines to keep things untangled:
Color-coding the branches wound up working really well, because as the colors mixed (e.g. yellow + blue = green), I could label pups with their blended colors to know at a glance which lines they could still combine with (e.g. a green could still blend with red, white, and/or black).
I also created my own system of "trading cards" for tracking each Dogz' genotype. Originally I printed them out on cardstock when I only had a few dozen Snowshoes and thought I'd hit my final breeding generation (hahaha). But as things continued to balloon I started printing them in miniature on regular paper and filing them into a binder filled with trading card sleeves.
Here's what a basic card looks like, with my eternal thanks to GenePoolz for its excellent visualization layout for the base structure:
After these are printed I write in the color numbers above the swatches by hand because it's too much of a pain in the neck for me to do digitally. But after that's put in place, I can see everything on each card: all of the genes, all the included family lines (in this example brown means that red, blue, and yellow have been included, and then also white), the generation number, whether they're a full Snowshoe (signified by the tan border), and who the parents are. This makes for super-quick matching as well as fast lookups in my file folders if I want to check on siblings or parents to see what DNA is hanging around in their immediate family.
This experiment has been so much fun. I loved inventing system after system as I went along; when I started out I had only the thinnest plan that was only more obviously threadbare by the minute. I also made mistakes while I was finding my groove: I had intended to create four separate family lines but realized very late into the process that two trees had common ancestors, which is why there are two red lines instead of one. And no, I don't know how I found it in me to create two extra lines after the initial four. I just reeeaaally wanted black-eyed Snowshoes, and a larger breeding pool was the only way.
It's also funny that I feel like Scotties kinda define me now. I've never had a favorite overall breed, and like I said, I'd never even adopted a Scottie before. Yet here I am, Scotties everywhere! I think we'll be bonded forever.
Nowadays I'm just chasing down color combinations and beautiful eye mutations... but also thinking about maybe getting into showing as my next project? Showing is another thing I've never done, and I'd so love to find an outlet for my newfound Scottie adoration.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy another group photo! (This is but the tip of the iceberg...)
EDIT: Oh shoot, I'd completely forgotten that Mirkenin, the gray Scottie I'd originally featured in the trading card example, isn't a full Snowshoe! Whoops. (I'm just too in love with her brown eyes, haha.) Card has been swapped, but Mirkenin is going to stay in the above group photo as a little sassy easter egg.