Pedigree research can give us clues as to where the chocolate gene could have descended from in these Aby lines. My personal Aby database has more than 6500 cats, and is by no means complete for the breed. I have made the effort to track back, to the foundation of the breed, the cats I have in my breeding program, and also of these found chocolates. This has been the work of many years, and the people who contributed information to it are too numerous to mention. The members of the Shorthair Linechasers e-mail list at Yahoogroups have been very helpful. In some cases certified pedigrees were used for the information on some cats. I also have used on-line sources of Abyssinian pedigree information: the Baton Rouge database has just over 24,000 Abys; the Clarion database has over 8000 Abys; and the Electronic Register of Somalis (E.R.o'S.) has more than 30,000 Abys and Somalis in it's database.
I did a study of the complete ancestry of the chocolate/lilac Aby line positively identified so far. The pedigree of Highsteppers Big Red of Kimoci is complete to the breed foundation, with 771 different cats. I do want to point out that none of the Burmese or Siamese crosses done in the 1970's appear in this cat's ancestry. Two cats are of particular interest:
These two cats, born in the 1980's, are both registered as red, or sorrel. One, or both of these cats, had to be chocolate. There is a color picture of Diablo in the 1986 TICA yearbook, and even though color identification using pictures is unreliable, I can look at it and believe this cat is chocolate. The picture shows a very dark tail tip, dirty pink paw pads, and possible eye liner. It may be that the legend of the "Diablo" red is a red herring, in several instances Diablo was bred to a descendant of Loner. TICA judge Penny Garrett, Pengar cattery, upon seeing CH Ohmy Nile Dragon of Leotie, and learning of this theory, told me that she thinks that a fawn she bred, Pengar's Goldie Hawn, descended from Loner on both side of her pedigree, was probably really a lilac. I do not have a complete pedigree for this cat, so I am unaware if Diablo appears or not.
Looking at the pedigrees of these two cats, it is seen that Diablo received one of his two non-ruddy genes from GRC Badfinger's Genesis of Catknapp, via ruddy GRC Badfinger's Bumin' Around TQ, and the other through his ruddy dam, CH Abanth's Sabra of Dhmahl. Loner received one of his two non-ruddy genes from his maternal grand-dam, GRC Helium's Misfire, who gave the gene to her ruddy daughter, QGC Helium's Meg of Highsteppers. The other non-ruddy gene carried by Loner came from his sire, CH Darken's The Red Machine. Red Machine in turn, received one of his color genes from CH Mi-Si-Am Tangela, via her ruddy daughter, CH Aby-Syn Samba Dancer of Tapp-An, and the other color gene from GRC Thieroff's Flash Farkel, a color bred red, heavily inbred to Taishun Kephra. A New Zealand red, Finisterre Phara, appears on Flash's dam's side, along with an early American red, CH Three-D Danny of Pallady. Danny appears in the pedigrees of both Diablo and Loner. All this illustrates is that the question of where the chocolate gene actually came from will probably never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, and all we can tell is that it is firmly incorporated into the breed.
