Is my Scottish Fold pregnant?

I have a 2year old Scottish fold who has had a litter before and we think she is pregnant again.her nipples are pink and they are losing hair hair around them.we do not know how far long she is.she is looking for spot to lay.do you think she is close to giving birth?

Beautiful Foldie! l have one too, he's in my avatar.

Did you put her with a stud cat or did she get out, that you don't know if she's pregnant?

@StefanZ

Actually..we think it is her son from the first litter which she had in October of last year...but our other stud cat is fixed and she growled at loki(her son)all the time until about two weeks ago but she never goes outside..but Loki is a foldie/tabby cat.

Does he have the folded ears, or straight?

Folded

Maybe you should consider a spay/abort before she gets too far along, or hopefully just a spay if she's not yet pregnant. 100% of Fold x Fold kittens will have cartilage defects leading to physical abnormalities and pain, called Osteochondrodysplasia.

l'll go back to PM since this thread was initiated by @kellyann2582  

Is That's a really bad thing?

l sent you some info in a PM. l'll ask a mod to split off your posts into your own thread so others can welcome you.

emilygrace said:

Is That's a really bad thing?

Click to expand...

YES!! AND IT IS PAINFUL!

OK...

Sorry to contradict but I think it's only 25 percent that have abnormalities. Still too many but normal folds are heterozygous and the severe abnormalities are present in homozygotes

l've read studies that said it is all. Hopefully you're right, but l have a Fold and researched this after ( ) getting him, and found out that not only do they now believe that 100% of Homozygous kittens have these deformities, but that all heterozygous kittens do too, to a lesser degree. Her kittens would be homozygous, so deformed whether the last point is true or not.

http://www.ufaw.org.uk/OSTEOCHONDRODYSPLASIASCOTTISHFOLD.php#clinical

http://www.icatcare.org/advice/cat-health/scottish-fold-disease-–-osteochondrodysplasia

No. They're both heterozygotes,I'm assuming as most folds are, so half her kittens would also be heterozygotes, a quarter would be homozygous for fold and a quarter would be homozygous for non-fold. You could be right about the heterozygotes. It's possible the thinking has changed since I heard this example in college, as it's been a while, but I'm pretty confident in the genotype breakdown. Unless she has homozygotes, which I doubt if she doesn't know about these issues already

l'm going by what l read, where they refer to homozygous as Fold x Fold, as in this other example:

In osteochondrodysplasia of Scottish Fold, the severity and duration of clinical manifestation, and radiographic lesions depend on genetic types. Cats homozygous for the gene (Fold-to-Fold matings) developed progressive skeletal changes, including epiphyseal and metaphyseal deformities, secondary osteoarthritis and exuberant exostosis around the distal extremities early in their lives, compared to heterozygote with much milder joint disorders later in their life [4,5,6,7].

Bold is mine.

Any google search will call up the same information: Fold x Fold is crippling (even good breeders include it on their pages), usually at a young age. Fold x Straight has less severe defects more notable with age.

The stud who got her pregnant is not full blooded Scottish fold..he's a Scottish fold/tabby

But rue(soon to be mother)is very healthy and so is the tabby and the stud who got her pregnant

lt has nothing to do with their health, it is a cartilage mutation that causes the folded ears - the very thing the breed is bred for! When a Fold eared cat is bred to another Fold eared cat the result is 100% of the kittens will be crippled by the deformity at a young age. PLEASE look it up, talk to your vet, write to breeders, read the studies!

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-0813.1999.tb11672.x/abstract


http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/pmcc/articles/PMC2868141/

http://www.catsofaustralia.com/scottish_fold.htm

l can add links to the thousands of hits that will come up on Google that tell you the same thing. Please read them before your cat is too far along.

I cannot comment on the breed or breed mutations. However, if you speculate that the off-spring of the cat is the one that got her pregnant that alone is serious cause for concern. Inbreeding leads to serious problems and deformaties and can lead to stillbirths.

Our vet currently cares for a cat that is the product of such inbreeding. This poor boy has facial and oral deformities, along with cognitive problems.

Okay, I'm going to try and explain again what I meant, as I think it just came off as a bunch of jargon. Sorry about that, and about being a pest, but I have some background in genetics and really like the subject. And mistakes about genetics seem to be everywhere, which is one of my more obnoxious pet peeves. This is going to read like a bit of a genetics primer, so feel free not to read it if you're not interested, but I don't see how I can adequately explain why not all the cats are severely deformed without some basic background.

Every gene, including the one responsible for the Scottish fold ears, has two alleles, one from each parent. In some genes, there are different alleles, in this case folded or normal ears. A cat is homozygous for a gene if the two alleles are the same (ie both folded or both straight) and heterozygous if they are different. Most Scottish Folds are heterozygous, as the "fold" gene is incompletely dominant. When there is only one copy, you get the folded ears (and apparently still some cartilage problems. Thank you for informing me of that, I'm not an expert or up-to-date on this particular mutation as I do not own a Scottish fold and am not a vet). When there are two copies, you have the full syndrome. When both alleles are normal, you just have a straight-eared standard cat.

So each parent, if both are heterozygous folds, both have the genotype Ff (where F is the allele for folded ears and f is the allele for straight). Each parent randomly contributes one allele to each kitten. We can have offspring that are FF (which will be the seriously compromised kitty discussed above), Ff (normal scottish folds) or ff (scottish straights). Because of the way the math works out, a full 50% of the kittens in a large enough sample will be Ff, with the remainder evenly distributed between FF and ff. Of course, in a real litter there are few enough kittens that most of the time you won't get this exact breakdown, but in theory.

This is the same way human mutations work, which is why if two carriers of a disease have children, not all of their kids will have the condition and some may not even be carriers. It's part of why IVF is such a big deal to many families, as they can reproduce without worrying about having a child with a life-threatening mutation even if they are both carriers.

DISCLAIMER: I am not promoting the breeding of foldxfold. They are two carriers of the same mutations and this is the only pairing that can produce the full condition. This is also why inbreeding can lead to some seriously screwed up animals. Two related animals are much more likely to be carrying the same disease. If this cat isn't in a breeding program, you should get her spayed. If she is, you should look into a mismatch shot which can be used to terminate the pregnancy. BUT not every foldxfold kitten will have the full-blown disease. The only way you would have a litter of 100% homozygous fold kittens would be if you bred two homogenous cats, from foldxfold pairings, together Okay, genetics rant over.

For a look at how pairings like this are normally evaluated, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square Interested parties can also get a fuller look at the rant.

And sorry if this is boring or common knowledge. It's a little hard for me to judge, as most of the people I discuss this kind of thing with have a similar background to me.