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Hey all,
I have decided that I'll be ready to take up another variety alongside my doves towards the end of the year, and I've chosen chocolate self. I have a few options for starting the line, and I just want some advice as to which is the best way of going about it.
1) I could get chocolate selfs in from someone - but does anyone know of any good chocolate self breeders? I don't know of any, there doesn't seem to be any in the yearbook and I never see chocolate selfs in the show reports in NMC news. It's weird because chocolate seems quite popular in marked and tans.
2) I could get in chocolate tans and black selfs, I know of a few successful breeders of both. Then I could cross them together and weed out the tans and blacks that show up, but I think this is likely to leave me with a lot of work to clean up vents, not to mention the fact that this is a big outcross bringing two seperate lines together, and as most of you have probably gathered, I'm not that big on outcrossing
3) My dove line has thrown both champagnes and blacks recently - if I mated these together I could separate out the chocolate and work on it from there. This means a few more litters, but I know the line and the mice, and I've worked really hard at cleaning up vents and stuff so any chocolates bred from them shouldn't have those problems. I just don't know what kind of effect having a champagne ancestry will have on the resultant chocolate colour?
At the moment, option 3 is my preferred one, but if anyone can suggest anything else or thinks options 1 or 2 might be better, please let me know!
Sarah xxx
Edited for grammar
I have decided that I'll be ready to take up another variety alongside my doves towards the end of the year, and I've chosen chocolate self. I have a few options for starting the line, and I just want some advice as to which is the best way of going about it.
1) I could get chocolate selfs in from someone - but does anyone know of any good chocolate self breeders? I don't know of any, there doesn't seem to be any in the yearbook and I never see chocolate selfs in the show reports in NMC news. It's weird because chocolate seems quite popular in marked and tans.
2) I could get in chocolate tans and black selfs, I know of a few successful breeders of both. Then I could cross them together and weed out the tans and blacks that show up, but I think this is likely to leave me with a lot of work to clean up vents, not to mention the fact that this is a big outcross bringing two seperate lines together, and as most of you have probably gathered, I'm not that big on outcrossing
3) My dove line has thrown both champagnes and blacks recently - if I mated these together I could separate out the chocolate and work on it from there. This means a few more litters, but I know the line and the mice, and I've worked really hard at cleaning up vents and stuff so any chocolates bred from them shouldn't have those problems. I just don't know what kind of effect having a champagne ancestry will have on the resultant chocolate colour?
At the moment, option 3 is my preferred one, but if anyone can suggest anything else or thinks options 1 or 2 might be better, please let me know!
Sarah xxx
Edited for grammar
