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Taking the Past into the Future
Trendipuss and Happytyme Ragdolls have bred Ragdolls for over 20 years, both catteries soon realised that their hopes and ideas as breeders were the same. This led the two catteries to combine and breed together for 18 years, in this time the genetic foundations were laid for the breeding program we have today. In 2010, Trendipuss and Happytyme Ragdolls came to a crossroads in their aims, at which time careful thought was given to where their breeding program was progressing. Teresa and Phill (Tumblerags) had the expertise, breeding knowledge and objectives for Ragdoll cats that fitted into the existing program. This prompted the three catteries to unite, each cattery having its own strengths which compliments the other two catteries.
The aims of our breeding program is to
- Breed kittens that conform to the SOP (Standard of Points )
- Ensure that our Ragdolls have genetic diversity without having to use outside stud boys.
The Ragdoll cat has become very populare through out the world, many kittens are born each year. some of these kittens have lines to other breeds of cat, others do not trace in all lines back to Josephine, Buckwheat or Daddy Warbucks. The group of Ragdolls that trace in all lines back to the above original three are often referred to as "Traditional Ragdolls". Each year year this group of Ragdolls gets smaller as they are not replaced within the gene pool. As breeders, one of out aims is to increase the gene pool of traditional ragdolls without saturating the lines, whilst we are trying to acheive this goal, we also want to decrease the inbreeding in each of the kittens we raise. This will ensure genetic diversity and avoid any problems with inbreeding.
We have carefully planned our breeding programme as today’s kittens are the foundations of our future plans and aims.
We believe that each breeder is the custodian of their chosen breed. We aim to maintain a healthy gene pool of this group of Ragdolls. We feel using advances in DNA technology along with our personal knowledge of the history of the Ragdoll, combined with hands on experience of many of the Ragdoll cats in the pedigrees we use will give us a better insight into the genotype and phenotype of our breeding Ragdolls.
Each mating is carefully thought through, we breed each litter with the intent of keeping a kitten from those parents. Sometimes the kitten we want is not in the litter, our planned breeding policy (to ourselves) is very strict, if we have planned a mating to keep a boy and the litter is all girls we will not keep a girl kitten, this would mean we would have to change out breeding plans at a later date. This often works to the advantage of other breeders, as kittens with exceptional type and pedigree will be available.
Within the term “Traditional Ragdoll” is an even smaller group of ragdolls, these cats are unique to the United Kingdom. They are often referred to as “English” or “Pure Blossom Time”. These Ragdolls trace back in all their lines to the Blossom Time ragdolls that were imported into the United Kingdom by Lulu Rowley and Pat Brownsell. The majority of the Ragdoll cats we breed from fall into this category. We have purposely ensure that our stud boys predominately fall into this group, as they can then be bred to “English Line” or “Traditional” Ragdolls thus increasing the gene pool. As time progresses more of our potential stud boys will be shown. Sometimes we only use a stud boy for 2 or 3 litters, and will then neuter the boy; this is not because we are unhappy with his offspring. Our plans will have been to keep a daughter or two from this boy to breed back to one of our older boys.
We seldom repeat a mating and are very conscious of the genotype of our Ragdolls; we ensure that one Ragdoll does not appear in all our cats pedigrees. As if we found a genetic fault within one of our cats, we may have saturated our gene pool with this fault. All our breeding ragdolls have been DNA tested for the known HCM gene. We were extremely pleased with the results, only a small number of our cats results came back as the cats being carriers of the HCM gene.
This was not good luck; we feel it was due to knowing the ancestry of our cats and being aware of this gene within the breed. Going forward we will now breed these particular cats which carry the gene to cats that are negative for the gene. Within a short period of time this gene will have been eliminated from our breeding cats without losing genetic diversity. We have some concerns that if everyone neuters any ragdolls that carry or have this gene without breeding a clear or heterozygous offspring, eventually we will close down the gene pool of the ragdoll.
Ragdolls can now be tested for the PKD gene, to date we have tested the majority of our cats and the results were even better than the HCM results! This was cause for celebration as the 50 years of combined ragdoll breeding know how and in depth knowledge of our ragdolls ancestry makes us, as breeders feel we are definitely going in the right direction whilst breeding our beloved ragdolls with love and passion!
We feel that our girls are for maintaining our gene pool and our boys are for improving it. If we keep this in mind, it means that our boys have to have some excellent traits which will improve our breeding program. The girls that we choose to be the dams our stud boys have to show certain important factors in both phenotype and genotype, as we plan our pedigrees differently depending if we want to keep a boy or a girl.
Our boys are all unique in their pedigrees; we do not sell litter brothers for stud in the same country. Once we have planned a mating to keep a boy for ourselves, and if there is a suitable boy within the litter which we decide to keep, we would not sell another boy for stud.
This makes each of our stud boys attractive in lineage, which enhances the pedigrees of their off spring that they proudly present.
Many breeders believe that offspring inherit more from their dams than their sires. With this in mind, we are aware of the strength of the dam lines (usually shown as the bottom line on a pedigree). Our traditional breeding program began with 26 female ragdoll cats. All carefully chosen, amongst these cats were daughters of Blossom Time Bananas, Blossom Time Romeo, Blossom Time Juliet and Blossom Time Lass.
We look at each of our girls as potential dams of our future stud boys; each girl must show physical traits of her ancestry. Today we are breeding from granddaughters of the above mentioned Blossom Time Ragdolls through their daughters Petil Lu Ezmirelda, Petil Lu Arianna, Petil Gizmo and Blossom Time Lass.
When we plan matings we hope that the resulting kittens will all look very similar, if the resulting litter consists of only one or two outstanding kittens, we prefer not to keep them or sell them for breeding. We believe (and have found) that a litter of kittens that are all different in type tend to produce offspring that are all very different. We are aiming for a consistent look, to ensure that this look is correct our Ragdolls are regularly shown- Winning many awards including Top Mitted Adult, Top Colour Point Adult, Top Seal Bi Colour Kitten, Top Female Bi Colour Best of Variety, Best in Show Adult, Best In Show Kitten etc!
The foundation girls also included ragdolls bred by early U.K breeders these Ragdolls were Pandapaws Demelza, Catricat ragaminty, Catricat Gretal, Fawpawz Gretal, Adhuilo Mirabella, Emerisle Blue Lagoon, Doromas Synphony, Suchfun Chantilly Girl , Carrasacat Stardust, Mynamis Hot Gossip, Evara Jasmine and Dellas Babe.
It would be easier to achieve our goal of a correct type ragdoll with a consistent look within our cattery by inbreeding/line breeding, as this multiplying of the same genes would ensure a concentration, therefore eventually all our cats would visually and genetically look and be the same. This pathway of breeding is not for us, we want to open up the gene pool of the Traditional ragdoll and decrease the inbreeding within the kittens we breed. To ensure we were able to do this, we imported Meadowpurrs Melody, Redrose Chanel and purchased Dreamcats Razzmatazz and Adoulzo Muffat.
We were asked to help with the rehoming of the late Del Andersons Purrfurus Ragdoll cats, many of her ragdolls cats were sold abroad. After careful consideration it was decided to incorporate the traditional ragdoll cats from the Purrfurus lines into our breeding program, Del’s lines came from ragdolls she had purchased in the U.K and from ragdolls she has imported. The ragdolls from the Purrfurus lines that we decided to use were Lamor Jewel, Lamor Seal of Approval, Lamor Secret in Blue, Lamor Purrfurus Perfect and Adinolo American Dream. We have to thank Lyndsey Benterman for breeding these ragdolls from Purrfurus lines.
Very occasionally we do have to breed close, but this is only done when we are sure of the lines that are being used and the resulting offspring are not sold for breeding. The only two full sisters bought as foundation ragdolls for our breeding program were Admewlo Melody and Admewlo Monique.
Another of our aims is to genetically consolidate the very distinctive look of the original Raggedy Ann ragdoll cat which in time means our ragdolls will all look like the originals. We have watched and observed many breeds of cat and dog change over the years, the ragdoll has also changed but maybe not as dramatically as other breeds of cat.
The journey we are now on to breed these wonderful ragdoll cats, started for the original two catteries over twenty years ago, the three catteries (Tumblerag, Trendipuss and Happytyme) now have a consolidated breeding program. Our eventual destination is accomplishing our breeding goal through genetics, good animal husbandry and historical research.
For us it is very important knowing where we want to go,
we have defined our standards,
goals and more importantly
our vision for the ragdoll cat for the future
The offspring of our Ragdoll cats is much in demand and many lines are not readily for sale, as our own breeding programe is the overriding consideration
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