Off course, the surest way to either prove or falsify this possibility, is by outcrossing them to specimens of an unrelated lineage. And this is where the story got redirected into interesting and unexpected territories, way beyond my imagination, and certainly way beyond my intentions. The Albino Tiger Bull as pictured above, being just one out of many pleasant surprises. Again, I will elaborate on this later.

You see, this guy also offered me this very nice subadult pair of extreme yellow Hypo Bulls. He couldn’t tell me which kind of Hypo, as he wasn’t aware of the existence of several (well, at least two) distinct Hypo strains to begin with. As this pair resembled the Stillwater Hypo reasonable enough, and looked quite different from the (more commonly available) Trumbower Hypo, to me the former possibility seemed to be the most plausible one.

Well, as it turned out, I was right about that too. But again, not entirely right.

Anyway, one year later both couples seemed big enough to breed, so I paired the Stillwater male with the Kingsville female, and the Kingsville male with the Stillwater female, resulting in 29 juveniles. All quite normally patterned, nothing in between.

The next year, I bred my Kingsville male to my Kingsville female, giving 16 juveniles, all “Tigers”.

http://gallery.connectedbypets.com/photo.php?id=424704
http://gallery.connectedbypets.com/photo.php?id=424703

Therefore, given it’s all-or-nothing nature as observed, I concluded that if indeed this “Tiger” thing would turn out to be an inheritable trait, it would have to be single recessive. However, reasonable as this all may sound, it really doesn’t prove anything. Getting “Tigers” by breeding (presumed heterozygous) normals on the other hand, actually would.

And so it was done.
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I'm Dutch. Somebody shoot me.

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