What is Relaxed Style Selective Breeding?

I answer this question in the Introduction, so if you’ve already read that, go ahead and skip to the “What Do I Need To Get Started” section. Otherwise, the short answer to that question is “It’s a style of selective breeding that doesn’t use strict guidelines to create your breed”. It’s like letting a dog take the lead during a walk – you let the breed decide what it wants to be.

What Do I Need To Get Started?

You’ll need:

• PetzA – Available at Sherlock Software
• Prism’s PetzA Fork – Available at The RatShack
• I use Petz4 but feel free to use Petz5 if that’s your preference.
• Patience – for this I listened to interesting YouTube videos. Lately it’s Summoning Salt speedrun documentaries.

Some things that also help:

• Petz Thumbnails – they allow you to preview petz from inside of Windows Explorer. Available at The RatShack
• GenePoolz – I don’t use this during Selective Breeding, but lots of others do. It’s great if you want to see what your pet has inherited from its parents. Available at Yabiko.

It Begins

For this particular project I’m going to talk you through the process and then I’ll show it to you.

To begin, I start with two petz with traits that I like. They can be Gen1s from the Adoption Center or they can be mixies that you already have. Just get two petz that you think will mesh well together.

I breed them (usually in a batch of 20) and if they have offspring that I like, I’ll breed the offspring together. Then, I look at their offspring and repeat the process. I’ll gradually add or adjust criteria to the breed if I have some stubborn genes or ones that pop up that I really like.

I rinse and repeat this process until it breeds true. To keep us focused, let’s go ahead and set some criteria for our selective breed.

Here are my starting petz. Their traits will help inform what sort of goals we can set.

For this project I’m going to set the following goals for the breed.

For this breed I’m shooting for:

• Dane Head
• Dane Body
• Dali Ears
• Dali Tail
• Either Leg
• Either Foot
• Either Coat, Dali preferred
• Inbreeding OK

And with that established, let’s go ahead and get started.

A Practical Demonstration – The First Few Generations

Let’s go ahead and talk about the steps of Selective Breeding. At least the steps we’ll be repeating each generation.

• Breed
• Select

It’s just those two. You breed petz, select the parents of the next generation and then repeat. For the first two generations selection is going to be pretty simple. For Gen1 pick out a pair of petz with the features you want from the Adoption Center. Since Generation 2 is guaranteed to have an even mix of genes, you can always skip using GenePoolz. Just pick petz that match pretty closely with your goal. From Generation 3 you can start using GenePoolz to refine your selection.

To begin, I batch bred 50 puppies from this pairing. Larger numbers make it easier for us to get what we’re shooting for. Remember, in Selective Breeding big numbers make things much easier for us.

Once the puppies are bred, we can sort through what we want to keep and what we want to remove from the gene pool. I narrowed it down to 5 dogs we could keep and the rest were sent off for adoption. You have the option to delete or store for later use if you’d like.

The community voted on the Green and Blue (periwinkle?) bows, so that’s what we’ll use for the next generation. It takes several generations before a selective breed starts to breed true, so we’ll be repeating this process a lot. To make things easier I’ll also be naming the parents of each generation 11 and 111 to keep them at the top of my screen in File Explorer.

I won’t be showing any more batch breeding gifs, don’t worry. Let’s go ahead and breed these two and see what we get. It’ll be a mix, just like generation 2.

Now that we have Generation 3, we can use Petz Thumbnails to quickly see who we can adopt out and who we can keep.

This time, out of 50, only 3 of the dogz fit our criteria. I left it up to the community which two petz to choose again. I’m still not sure what coat to shoot for, so the input is important to me.

We voted on breeding the dogz with the red and orange bow for the coat patterns. I liked this choice too! Let’s see what happens.

This time, we only got 2 dogz that fit our criteria. This is a good opportunity to stop and take a closer look at their genes with GenePoolz.

Looking at this first set of inherited genes, we can see that this dog is going to throw an equal mix of Dalmatian and Great Dane genes. Not ideal, but at this point it’s not a surprise either. It takes quite a few generations for a selective breed to start breeding true. Let’s take a look at the second dog.

This is more promising! Right off the bat, we can see that this dog is going to throw puppies with Dalmatian ears, which is part of our goal. Everything else is still a mixed bag, but we’re getting closer.

Let’s start the next generation.

We’re making progress! These two dogz will throw dali ears 100% of the time. Here’s what their genetics look like. Yes, both of them. It’s a shame that out of 100 dogz, we only got 1 that looks like our goal, but that’s normal for Selective Breeding.

They each carry the Dalmatian Gene (though it’s only expressed in one of them) and they both got Dali Ears from both of their parents. I’m doing batches of 100 now, so things so go more quickly. Really, Selective Breeding is mostly about filtering out what you do or don’t want from a generation.

This is much better! We have 4 dogz that look exactly the way we want. Let’s open them up in GenePoolz and see what we find.

Dali Ears
Dane Head
x Bod
x Tail
x Coat

These are the incredibly detailed notes I took in notepad. Every single one of these dogz will throw Dali Ears AND Dane Faces! Wonderful news!

It’s still 50/50 for the Body, Tail and Coat. But this is great progress!

From here, we just repeat the steps we’ve done in the previous generations. Remember, those steps are:

• Breed
• Select

Let’s just speed through the remaining Generations.

We had to lock in one trait at a time – The Coats came first, then the tails, and finally the body shape. Their Legs, Feet, Tongues, Whiskers and Brains just sort of worked themselves out on their own which was perfect. Actually, I find this happens a lot in my “relaxed” selective breeding projects. Sometimes, when you aren’t too picky about some of the features they can work themselves out.

It took 11 generations but we got there! I present to you the Jello Danes.

It took a lot of time to write this guide, but I hope it presented a realistic view of how doing a Selective Breeding Project can go! I hope it also provided you with enough information about how the process actually works.

If you have suggestions or further questions, feel free to message me on discord (@.kezune) or leave a comment below. Thank you for reading!