# Is it even worth it?



## littlelovesmousery

I'm just getting back into breeding & I've been trying hard to decide what variety I wanted to focus on.

My end goal is eventually have tris, but I also would love to keep breeding broken marked in various colors while working towards the best show type mouse I can come up with. I read yesterday on a website (that I cannot for the life of me remember what it was) that breeding broken marked mice was essentially a waste of time because it was more luck than anything if you got your marks right & that it was very rare for them to place in shows at all. Am I completely wasting my time by even wanting to breed them?

Is this not a variety that anyone even considers working with anymore?

I'm VERY new to the mousing community so I was just wondering what everyone elses opinions were.


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## Jack Garcia

I always encourage people away from breeding tricolors and marked varieties. Maybe that's why they're so popular!

If you want to do well and see major improvements, I recommend PEWs. They're easy to breed because you can totally ignore the color and markings (they are perfect every time). If white mice seems too boring, dove or champagne are good choices with similar variety profiles since they're light, PE self varieties.

Good marked mice (broken, even, belted, rumpwhite, tricolor, etc) _do_ owe a large portion of their appearance to good breeding, but a very large portion is also just plain luck, like you said. To breed a really GOOD marked mouse, you may have to breed literally hundreds of animals at a time in order to get one or two that is acceptable.

No one in the US really does marked varieties justice, in my view, because 1) they don't know how and 2) it's more hard work than many people seem to realize and 3) they keep too many varieties to begin with.


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## tinyhartmouseries

People can breed broken marked out of sheer love for it, while keeping type expectations low. It's just more about what you like, but yeah, you may not do well showing with it. Or, you might, because you'd be one of the only ones.


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## love2read

I'm working on breeding broken-marked and I find it to be extremely rewarding. 

Yes, it's mostly luck, but when you DO strike gold and get a really nicely-marked mouse it's extremely exciting! WAY more exciting them breeding solid colors and always knowing exactly what you're going to get, imo.

Here's the best broken-marked I've gotten so far:


















I really need to take new pics of her. Her dad is show-type and mom is mix-type, so she's not the best type, but I just LOVE her markings!

Anyways, I feel like the same thing applies to Tri-color as well, which is another side-project of mine. I've had multiple litters and only had 2 splashy-tris that I thought were okay. I only just now am getting halfway-decent tris and they've still got a LOOOONNNNGGGG way to go. It's hard work, but in the end I hope it will be worth it!


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## Laigaie

Whether any given variety is "worth it" depends entirely on why you're breeding.

If you want to do well in shows, pale selfs are a definite advantage.

If you want to breed what you like, and you like brokens, do it. When you get a perfect broken (or any marked variety like dutch or even), there's nothing to compare. It will win. Or it should, if your judge is worth their salt.

With tris, they're really popular right now as a side-project, but if you can't get your hands on good starting stock, it will take forever. It's a very difficult variety, to be completely honest, as it combines the difficulties of broken with the difficulties of splashed and c-diluted varieties. If you love them, go to the effort of getting good starting stock, and be aware of the difficulty. Of course, you'll never be at a loss for homes for them, as even pet owners think they're positively stunning.

Really, I feel like people who really are into the showing should pick a variety whose difficulties match what they'd like to handle. For everyone else, work on a variety you love. You'll do it far more justice, so long as you're aware of the downsides of the variety.


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## littlelovesmousery

Thank you everyone for your replies. I really appreciate everyone's input! I'm starting to think that perhaps showing isn't for me because while I like all mice, I am not particularly drawn to any of the self varieties which seem to make up the bulk of the show entries. As Laigaie said, I think I would rather work with a variety I love versus one that I've just chosen for the sake of showing...and nothing says I can't still enter them in pet classes right?


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## Jack Garcia

Right.


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## SarahY

Marked mice are no harder than anything else and you don't need large numbers of them. I breed Dutch and have been successful with them - and I've never kept more than three bucks and twenty or thirty does (in twelve cages) at any one time. This year I've been focusing a lot more on their type, so I haven't produced any winning markings. SarahC breeds brokens, they have lovely type and she does very well with them consistantly. Wight Isle Stud also does well with his brokens. You get a LOT less showable mice than you would with selfs or tans; sometimes you may only have one to show but as Laigaie says if it's good it will win.

Here are some of SarahC's brokens: http://www.fancymicebreeders.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=77&t=5143

Go for it and, if it's what you love, don't let people put you off 

These show the improvement in type which I have made in 18 months of keeping Dutch:



















Provided you can get hold of a typey mouse to outcross to, there's no reason that you can't have brokens as typey in the same time


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## Jack Garcia

Those are pretty Dutch. I'm not used to seeing them in PE.



> Provided you can get hold of a typey mouse to outcross to, there's no reason that you can't have brokens as typey in the same time


In south central Kansas that's likely the catch.

In the US, even if you got hold of typier mice, depending on their source there may be no telling what recessives they carry. Breeding something like Himalayan, angora, or recessive yellow into a line of marked mice can easily wreak havoc on it, so if you do decide to obtain typier mice to improve marked varieties be sure you know their full backgrounds. Good luck!


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## tinyhartmouseries

littleloves, you will soon have great mice to outcross to, you can use them as Sarah stated.


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## littlelovesmousery

tinyhartmouseries said:


> littleloves, you will soon have great mice to outcross to, you can use them as Sarah stated.


I am more excited than you know. My husband told me if I mentioned "mice" on the phone one more time he was going to hang up lol


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## MojoMouse

SarahY said:


> These show the improvement in type which I have made in 18 months of keeping Dutch:


Wow, that's an improvement! Is it from selecting within the line, or did you include outcrosses to typier mice?


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## Wight Isle Stud

The honour at a mouse show is to win the red card for your breed class- difficulties in producing a breed to standard therfore apply to all the breeders in the class, so its a level playing field. The Broken/Dutch/Even is a breeders mouse and one that only responds to pure skill in selective breeding.I have heard the Fallacy a million times that breeding marked is Lady Luck. Give a top fancier a marked breed, and he/she will go to the top. Everyone else can use the Fallacy as an excuse.


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## Jack Garcia

But it's not exactly a fallacy. It's supported by the way pigment (and lack of pigment) is known to form along the lines of the neural crest. ALL pigment forms this way in mice, but when you have white spots, they're being placed with an element of randomness and carried through that a single colored mouse isn't.

You can breed marked mice who are similar-looking to a limited point, but only to that limited point, due to the way the pigment forms in utero. That's how there's chance involved in a way that isn't when you're breeding self varieties. 

I'm sure if you searched "pigment neural crest mice" in any academic search journal you'd find information on the formation of pigment.

*Edit:* here is one such easily-accessed article which mentions pigment formation, from the National Human Genome Research Institute: http://www.genome.gov/27527943


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## Wight Isle Stud

We don't need your links Jack. Explain why a top breeder will go to the top in any breed they choose- Marked, whatever. wheres your link for that ?


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## Jack Garcia

Your tone seems rather pointed toward me.


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## SarahY

> Wow, that's an improvement! Is it from selecting within the line, or did you include outcrosses to typier mice?


Thank you xx  I outcrossed to other mice. It is well documentated that if you outcross to self, by the time you get back to Dutch you'll have lost the type and will be back to small cobby mice. Well, this is not true. If you outcross and breed back in to Dutch then, yes, you will revert back to poor type. I outcrossed to my original dove selfs and some spectacular argentes from WoodWitch, and I didn't breed back into Dutch; I only bred the outcrossed mice together and discarded the original stock (after a while, obviously, in case it all went wrong!) so I was able to keep the type and work on the markings. I kept bucks which were typey, rather than well marked, and bred both typey and well-marked does to them. I reckon I am only one or two generations from having show quality Dutch again, hurrah!

Jack, Wight Isle Stud has many, many years of experience with marked mice, has been very successful on the show bench, and is speaking from hands-on, practical experience; stop trying to make yourself look clever and listen for a change.


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## Jack Garcia

I'll gladly listen, yet the biological basis of the allele being inherited in a specific manner is the exact same reason that reds always have inferior type due to mandible reduction, for example (see here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19644225). Don't get me wrong--there's _a lot_ that any skillful breeder can do, but there's also a very real biological limit imposed on some varieties due to particulars of their inheritance. That just cannot be disputed, no matter how talented the breeder is. And all of us are very talented! 

I think that if we were sitting at a table for coffee (or tea), we'd agree more than disagree.


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## MojoMouse

Wight Isle Stud said:


> We don't need your links Jack.


I do. I'm only new around here and I don't know the histories of the animosity, but I found this link, and his subsequent one, incredibly interesting.

Jack, it's funny that you posted about Dr Pavan's work because a couple of weeks ago I started scouring the internet for all I could find about melanocytes and their pleiotropic functions. My interest is because I've observed consistant differences in a mouse's physical traits that are associated with some dilutes. Specifically, mice with the the ce gene have quite distinctive craniofacial features - more than could be attributed to physical characteristics that are simply passed on down a line. For example, in a litter with some ce mice and others without this gene, the ce mice closely resemble each other with head shape and eye size (both are a function of the cranial form). The non ce litter mates don't share this. The ce mouse characterisitcs are noticeable even with unrelated mice.

Other physical characteristics I've noticed include black mice being smaller, and our chocolate black based mice (b, not cordovan) having a higher than average occurance of large ears.

All of this is of interest because I'm trying so hard to breed to improve type in my mice, and I can't just outcross to a show mouse as you guys can. I've got to do it the hard way, so anything I can learn about what causes/influences certain traits is valuable to me.

Sorry about the thread hijack here.  It's just that, with respect to the experienced breeders here, it saddens me that bad feeling can get in the way of sharing knowledge. If this means that I now smell bad on this forum, then so be it. Thanks for posting the links, Jack!


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## Cordane

MojoMouse said:


> Other physical characteristics I've noticed include black mice being smaller


And I'm hijacking even more. Completely off the mouse topic but the fact that you said black mice tend to be smaller can relate to cows.
In Scottish highlands, black cattle are smaller than every other colour. Well, not really smaller, black highlands seem to take 5 years to mature properly and reach the same stage say a red would in 3 years.

You can ignore all that, I just found it interesting.


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## MojoMouse

Not to be ignored at all. 

The link between physical traits and melanocytes has been demonstrated in many instances. From what I can gather, the biomechanics of this are a growing area of scientific interest.

In mice, the most obvious example is the fatmaus fawn. While researchers are still looking at the causal relationship, the link between phaeomelanin and obesity is a proven fact. I'm interested in the lesser known associations - I REALLY want the genetic recipe for big eyed, huge eared, fluffy coated, racy bodied mousies!  I want it NOW.


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## SarahC

MojoMouse said:


> Not to be ignored at all.
> 
> I REALLY want the genetic recipe for big eyed, huge eared, fluffy coated, racy bodied mousies!  I want it NOW.


I've got a mouse with huge eyes,he looks like a doormouse.I can't make up my mind whether they are nice or peculiar.He looks like he's being squeezed.Old now but I kept him for those spectacular eyes.


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## Frizzle

^^^
Pics? : )


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## Jack Garcia

MojoMouse said:


> Wight Isle Stud said:
> 
> 
> 
> We don't need your links Jack.
> 
> 
> 
> I do. I'm only new around here and I don't know the histories of the animosity, but I found this link, and his subsequent one, incredibly interesting.
> 
> Jack, it's funny that you posted about Dr Pavan's work because a couple of weeks ago I started scouring the internet for all I could find about melanocytes and their pleiotropic functions. My interest is because I've observed consistant differences in a mouse's physical traits that are associated with some dilutes. Specifically, mice with the the ce gene have quite distinctive craniofacial features - more than could be attributed to physical characteristics that are simply passed on down a line. For example, in a litter with some ce mice and others without this gene, the ce mice closely resemble each other with head shape and eye size (both are a function of the cranial form). The non ce litter mates don't share this. The ce mouse characterisitcs are noticeable even with unrelated mice.
> 
> Other physical characteristics I've noticed include black mice being smaller, and our chocolate black based mice (b, not cordovan) having a higher than average occurance of large ears.
> 
> All of this is of interest because I'm trying so hard to breed to improve type in my mice, and I can't just outcross to a show mouse as you guys can. I've got to do it the hard way, so anything I can learn about what causes/influences certain traits is valuable to me.
> 
> Sorry about the thread hijack here.  It's just that, with respect to the experienced breeders here, it saddens me that bad feeling can get in the way of sharing knowledge. If this means that I now smell bad on this forum, then so be it. Thanks for posting the links, Jack!
Click to expand...

You're very welcome. And thank YOU for speaking up. I am here to help, and I'm glad whenever I've been helpful! 

You may not like me--and that's OK--but you can't shut me up because I've done nothing wrong! I'm just sharing information. There are many people who don't necessarily know what some of us take for granted, so it's better to put information out there twice (or three times) than it is to withhold it under the assumption that "we don't need your links." Deep breaths are always good!


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## SarahC

Frizzle said:


> ^^^
> Pics? : )


We're all hijacking.I will get some pics.It's a silvered mouse and someone did tell me that they thought the lab origins of silvers/pearls had it's roots in something to do with an eye condition.I'm not well up on all the scientific stuff myself but I would be curious to know.


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## Cordane

SarahC said:


> Frizzle said:
> 
> 
> 
> ^^^
> Pics? : )
> 
> 
> 
> We're all hijacking.I will get some pics.It's a silvered mouse and someone did tell me that they thought the lab origins of silvers/pearls had it's roots in something to do with an eye condition.I'm not well up on all the scientific stuff myself but I would be curious to know.
Click to expand...

Yay! Mojo and I aren't alone!
But yes, I would love pictures also. A mouse with big eyes sounds adorable!


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## littlelovesmousery

Jack Garcia said:


> You're very welcome. And thank YOU for speaking up. I am here to help, and I'm glad whenever I've been helpful!
> 
> You may not like me--and that's OK--but you can't shut me up because I've done nothing wrong! I'm just sharing information. There are many people who don't necessarily know what some of us take for granted, so it's better to put information out there twice (or three times) than it is to withhold it under the assumption that "we don't need your links." Deep breaths are always good!


I appreciate the links too! I have so much to learn so every new link is more information.

And as for the thread hijacking, hijack away! I love seeing how threads can evolve and how people relate things to one another


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## Jack Garcia

littlelovesmousery said:


> Jack Garcia said:
> 
> 
> 
> You're very welcome. And thank YOU for speaking up. I am here to help, and I'm glad whenever I've been helpful!
> 
> You may not like me--and that's OK--but you can't shut me up because I've done nothing wrong! I'm just sharing information. There are many people who don't necessarily know what some of us take for granted, so it's better to put information out there twice (or three times) than it is to withhold it under the assumption that "we don't need your links." Deep breaths are always good!
> 
> 
> 
> I appreciate the links too! I have so much to learn so every new link is more information.
> 
> And as for the thread hijacking, hijack away! I love seeing how threads can evolve and how people relate things to one another
Click to expand...

Thank you so much!


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## SarahC

Frizzle said:


> ^^^
> Pics? : )


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