Words From A Founding Breeder.....

All snow cats are actually derivations of the very same albino gene often found in Nature, which shows up in many wild species. In its full expression, the albino gene will cause the individual to be white-haired and have pink eyes. Probably the best known snow color is the seal lynx point a gene often found in the Siamese gene pool….Later, introducing the Burmese cat gene pool, the colors seal mink snows and seal sepia snows became well known. Sepias and Minks are considered genetically different from each other. A seal mink snow is usually a green-eyed cat, born light beige in color…with the making developing to be a medium brown color. A seal sepia is usually gold to green eyed and born medium to dark brown in color…Snow cats can be both spotted or marbled in color. When breeding lynx point to sepias or minks, a litter of both colors will result. To get scientific, lynx point, mink, and sepia are the result of a mutation of the C gene series for full pigment…there fore, they are really not "colors" but varying "dilutions" of color. Distribution of color density gives us these amazing varying colors and patterns. Breeding to get snow kittens can be a bit of a challenge. Of course, when breeding a snow to a snow, you will have snow kittens, but, when one parent or both only "carry" the recessive snow gene, there will be a variety of colors possible. Difficulty arises when guessing whether or not, a brown spotted cat carries the recessive gene. There are those who feel they can tell just by looking…but in fact, the only way to know for sure is to breed and hope for a snow baby. If the litter contains at least one snow, you know that both parents carry the snow gene…it MUST BE PRESENT on both sides. -Written by Pam Vandell ( Pamspride )

 

Pictures of wild species in the snow colors

 

THE ALBINISM GENE

This gene controls the amount of body color and comes in five alleles: full color, "C", Burmese, "cb", Siamese, "cs", blue-eyed albino, "ca", and albino, "c".

The full color allele, "C", is wild, dominant, and produces a full expression of the coat colors. This is sometimes called the non-albino allele.

The Burmese allele, "cb", is mutant, recessive to the full color allele, co-dominant with the Siamese allele, and dominant to the blue-eyed albino and albino alleles. This allele produces a slight albinism, reducing black to very dark brown, called sable in the Burmese breed, and producing green or green-gold eyes. In the Bengal breed, this is the allele responsible for the seal sepia and seal mink (which have the gold to green eyes also) "snow" Bengals.

The Siamese allele, "cs", is mutant, recessive to the full color allele, co-dominant with the Burmese allele, and dominant to the blue-eyed albino and albino alleles. This allele produces a moderate albinism, reducing the basic coat color from black/brown to a light beige with dark brown "points" in the classic Siamese pattern and producing bright blue eyes. This is the allele responsible for the seal lynxpoint (and blue-eyed) "snow" Bengals.

The blue-eyed albino allele, "ca", is mutant, recessive to the full color, Burmese and Siamese alleles, and dominant to the albino allele. This allele produces a nearly complete albinism with a translucent white coat and very washed out, pale blue eyes.

The albino allele, "c", is mutant, and is recessive to all the others in this category, producing a complete albinism (lack of color pigmentation) resulting in a translucent white coat and pink eyes.