Selective Cat Breeding

It is interesting to imagine what would have happen if humans would have decided to domesticate the caracal (a kind of lynx), for example, as they almost did in ancient Egypt and India, as a help for hunting.

Maybe this book would be examining in detail the ample varieties of races of the caracal, selectively bred for hunting, recovery of preys, protection of houses, tending of flocks and maybe races, with an ample variety of corporal constitutions and different cloaks. But the dog resulted to be the most adequate animal for these activities.

And to three or four small species of wild cats it corresponded to establish a different relation with humans.

In spite of the posterior development of the specie, sometimes in the course of evolution and other with human interventions, cats keep on being basically cats and, in secondary plane, animals that adjust themselves to the arbitrary rules of their aspects to humans.

Constitution or Corporal Type
The basic attribute of all cats is their constitution or corporal type; that is, the size and the form of the trunk, the proportion of their feet and legs in respect to it, the length and the form of the tail, the shape of the head and the facial features.

These factors are determined by the poligenes, groups of genes that act together in almost all cats and that conform their most outstanding characteristics.

Normally, these poligenes don’t divide and the features they represent don’t change harshly between one generation and the next. Naturally, they can transform, along the generations through the application of minutely precise plans of selective breeding done to accentuate some features or to suppress others.

There exist some exceptions to the general rule, as is the mutations that gave place to the Manx, the Japanese bobtail and the Scottish fold, or the mutant gene for which one in a while cats are born with more than five fingers in each paw. These features are due to the mutations of individual genes, each one with a concrete effect that together produces a particular constitution.

In general, cats maintain the corporal type inherent to the genetic constitution of their parents and for it many breeders don’t approve the crossings of races because they bring complications to the normal genetic evolution.

The proposals of acknowledgment for the crossings as new races should be put under notice to the entire feline breeding world.

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