HOW BIG WILL MY CAT BE? WHAT IS A HIGH PERCENTAGE HYBRID?
What is a "High Percentage" Hybrid and "How big will my cat be?"
These are the most common questions we get, along with "what do I feed my hybrid?" (answered below). “HIGH PERCENTAGE” Hybrids & WILD BLOOD We get asked “how much wild blood will my cat have” or “what is the percentage of wild blood in my cat?” as well as see posts from other breeders marketing their “High percentage” hybrids. So lets talk about how to answer that and what amount of wild blood your cat might have. Understanding the amount of “Wild Blood” or “high percentage wild cat” in your Hybrid Starting with the basics - the offspring of any wild cat x any other domestic cat will be 50% wild cat and 50% domestic. That is called an F1 or G1 (a first generation hybrid). This is because we get 50% of our DNA from each parent. 50% from the wild ancestor, 50% from the domestic. The next generation (F2) is where things become tricky. Take that F1 (who was 50/50 wild and domestic) who will now pass down 50% of its dna to its offspring. Most people assume an *AVERAGE* amount of DNA being passed evenly down to the next generation, the 50% from the wild cat parent and the 50% of the domestic parent don’t stay separated in the genome. They get all mixed together. This is our uniqueness. Think of a gumball machine. The wild cat parent is green gumballs. The domestic parent is red. The F1 received 50% green, and 50% red. BUT because of recombination (meiosis) the green and red dna that are in the F1 are all jumbled together. Now open the dispenser and let half the gumballs out. Now it’s the genetic lottery. Most likely, using the law of averages, there will be 25% green, 25% red. BUT in theory the gumball machine could dispense ANY amount of green and red that is between 1% green and 49% red. Which means an F2 could receive only 1% of its wild ancestors DNA making it a less wild looking and smaller hybrid than a sibling who might receive 49% of its dna from the wild grandparent. And it happens! Take these two F2s. (Photo credit and owned by Will Powers: "One clearly hit the serval jackpot and got A LOT of serval DNA from its grandparent (probably more than 25% my guess is 35-40%!)." (Thanks to Will Powers for sharing this information!) The other, got less – maybe 10%. They were littermates. Both are F2! So while most people will be 25% of each of their grandparents, as a 50/50 split is most common, you could be 1% grandma and 49% grandpa on each side. This process continues to go down through to F5 and F6 by which point you have on average less than 1-3% “wild cat” dna. Now lets talk about breeding that first F1 BACK to a wild cat which is what most people would call a “high percentage” offspring. The problem though is to figure out for *certain* how much wild dna there is given the principle of meiosis at play. Obviously if you take a wild cat and breed it to ANY Hybrid then that offspring will automatically have a higher amount of “wild” blood or dna. If you have an F1 (which is 50% wild) and breed it to a wild cat then that offspring will be 50% wild blood from the parent, and some amount of 1-49% wild depending on the genetic lottery. An assumption is 25% so you will see an F1x wild cat offspring being marketed as a “HIGH PERCENTAGE F1 / 75% WILD BLOOD” – but the truth is that it could be 51% wild blood or 99%! Without doing a full genetic sequence you cant tell for certain. Because of this we will limit the use of percentages in our descriptions and stick to “F3xJC” which would be a Jungle cat x an F3 hybrid – this will result in a “higher than average” percentage of wild blood (as compared to being bred to a domestic) but there is no way to ascertain the exact amount without doing a genetic sequence.
FOOD
When it comes to feeding your new kitten there are so many options it's overwhelming. We asked fellow breeders for their recommendations, spent hours reading ingredients lists, reviewing recalls and of course through trial and error with our own pets finally landed on a brand that we trust.
The Healthy Pet Market
Life's Abundace
We've tried it all and we recommend Lifes Abundance for all our cats (and dogs!). We offer our clients *free food* so we hope you will give it a try!
Feeding Raw
Simply Rawsome
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website simplyrawsomeus.com
We love the raw diet from Simply Rawsome! Raw isn't for every owner but we highly recommend it for our hybrid breeds and as a supplement to domestics as well. Receive a special discount from us too for your first few orders from Simply Rawsome. Just get in touch! emeraldexoticcats@gmail.com