I didn't say it was one kitten per litter and that pairing was repeated three times with similar results. Last show year all four kittens from the litter were successful in getting finals at shows. Same with the next litter, although there were only two kittens. This recent litter had four kittens but only two have been shown, both finalled quite well in their last show. I don't know of ANY inbred Savannah litters doing that well.
I think that your thinking aligns better with CFA (Cat Fanciers Association), but then Savannahs aren't accepted there. They are fans of rabid inbreeding, hence the health issues they have with their very limited gene pools. TICA has always accepted outcrossing and hence has healthier lines in breeds like the Burmese etc.
Yes, we must agree to disagree, I am thankful that most of our breed's breeders don't seem to agree with your thinking either.
Just because some people do inbreeding incorrectly doesn't mean it isn't necessary to actually establish a breed. The irony is you can't have a "breed" without inbreeding. You can't on one hand use purebreds to create the Savannah cat and then on the other hand turn your nose down at the idea of purebreds. If people really believed that purebreds are such bad things, then why not use some stray american short hairs as the foundation stock for the Savannah?
"Because I couldn't reproduce the animal I wanted without using a purebred cat you would say (and remember, "purebred" basically means "an animal that is part of a breed created by inbreeding wherein the current animal has only been bred back to other animals from that same inbred foundation line).
And I would then say, "exactly". You don't have a Savannah Cat without purebreds. Oh, and I'm pretty sure everyone is breeding SBTs to other SBTs right? Certainly they aren't being crossed back with, say, a siamese. Well lets all sit back and watch that inbred coefficient go up together then, shall we?
As for health, I would also take a properly linebred animal against an outcross with regard to health/vigor any day because most of the deleterious genetics have been bred out and health and vigor are being selected FOR in the linebreeding. Properly linebred animals are healthier because when recessive genes do pop up you can eliminate those animals for the program and proper animals because homozygous for the healthy characteristics you want to preserve. Having established your line's strengths, you can then breed back to other complementary established lines to keep the inbred coefficient from getting too high and to continue improving your line. Frankly, it's all the outcrossers sending their animals to the newest hot stud with no planned breeding that create the problems in the breeds because they eliminate any genetic predictability. If everyone would get on the same page and linebreed correctly the genetic faults could be eliminated. Without linbreeding diseases just hide in the genepool, never fully exposed, randomly popping out as a matter of random chromosome pairing. The fact of the matter is that breeding to phenotype does little more than slightly improve results over random (because you have little to no idea what's in the genome, and phenotypes only loosely correlate to genetics) and winning shows has as much to do with time/money/effort as it does with the quality of the animal. Show me consistently reproducible type and I will concede. Show me ribbons and it's just not that interesting. You can win for having completely different strengths and weaknesses across animals, but that doesn't say much unless you can point to a cat and say "all of my cats have X" and "none of my cats have Y". Put another way, if a certain line isn't recognizable then what's the point of even having a cattery name?
Linebreeding isn't really possible in the higher generation Savannahs because they are, by definition, outcrosses. And, accordingly, look at how much variability there is in, say, an F2 Savannah when it comes to coat, size, temperament, energy level, diseases, etc. Why? Because they are outcrosses!
It's good PR to jump on the "inbreeding is bad" bandwagon, but it doesn't make much scientific sense and it certainly isn't internally consistent given the history of this, or ANY "breed" of any animal.
