It's been ages since I last posted here, but I thought this might be worth a shot....
There seems to be a lot of confusion between what is and what isn't a carrot-tail leo.
I've used tails from some of my own breeders or their offspring to illustrate the differences - and it's easy to tell, once you've seen a few....
(full-sized picture here - big file )
You can call your leopard(s) anything you want, but if you want to be technical about it, carrot-tails should have 'true carrot-tail' genes from the Ray Hine line (the original breeder). As you can see in the picture, there's a big difference between 'lots of orange in the tail' and 'carrot-tail'. It's almost like the old Kleenex controversy - we ask for a Kleenex, but will take any brand of facial tissue. The true carrot-tails are the Kleenex brand, but regular leos with lots of orange on their tails are Brand X. True carrot-tails also have a different shade of tangerine in their body colour, and most seem to have a more slender build as well. They almost seem long and slim, though with all the cross-breeding to non-carrot-tails, the body shape is becoming stouter and shorter. The dark or black tail bands in regular leopards is light grey or even absent in true carrot-tais, though it can be dark in carrot-tail crosses.
