Brown kitten?

[mrblanche]

The shelter has called and asked me to foster a kitten or two. The primary one they want me to work on socializing is a beautiful little chocolate brown boy. I know this is a rare color. Can any one make suggestions as to where such a color would come from?

 

[maewkaew]

  If it's totally brown all over  ( not with darker brown on the points),  that would come from getting 2 copies of the 'b' allele for brown (also called chocolate),  an alternate to black.

This brown (chocolate) allele is something that originally came from the Siamese and Burmese breeds;  it can be traced way back to about 100 years ago in  Siamese cats in England,  even though Chocolate Point was not yet an officially recognized color ,  so they were just considered lighter colored seal points.   

 Later on it also came from some Burmese.     A Burmese breeder told me that they had determined that a foundation cat for the Burmese in the West had this allele.   She was imported from Burma to the US in the 1930s. 

 Later this has been bred into other breeds and also has got into the general random-breeding cat population.  It's recessive so it has to be inherited from both parents ,  and the allele is not nearly so common as the dominant Black ,  so  there are not a huge number of chocolate  domestic shorthairs / longhairs around,   but they do turn up here and there.  There have been some photos of some of them on this site before.  and I also remember a beautiful Chocolate and White cat someone posted a photo of in this section.    

    In marketing on the shelter's website, Petfinder,  etc.,  I would just call him a "Rare Chocolate Brown Kitten" ,  rather than stretching credibility to call him some specific breed that he probably doesn't really look like and almost certainly isn't ,  and the pedigreed ancestors may have been many generations back and it's not even known which breed may be the closest in the ancestry   --  this color originally came from Siamese and Burmese but has been bred into some other breeds since the mid 20th century. 

 I should mention that there  is also another way for a cat to be brown --  it's a different allele  from the Burmese that can make a cat who is genetically Black turn out to be a deep rich  dark brown but with even darker "points".  That is the sepia allele ( cb) which is located at the albino locus.    

  But if this kitten is the same brown all over,  that is from Chocolate /Brown  at the Black locus. 

 If you get a chance to take some photos,  I'd love to see him!   Thanks for fostering kittens!