What are the odds?!

[OhhWatALoser]

Since we are getting technical.

[internet nazi]

Hetrozygous just means it carries one gene. It may or may not affect phenotype. But even some 'recessive' Hets do look different from non Hets.

- Butter Mojave Leucistic has 1 butter and 1 Mojave gene. But since both genes lie on the same genetic loci, they do make a homozygous form.

The prefix het means different, the prefix homo means the same. heterosexual vs homosexual being terms more people are familiar with. So heterozygous means the 2 alleles are different, homozygous means it is the same allele. A butter/mojave BEL is a heterozygous form, just neither are the normal allele. Getting ridiculously technical, butter and mojave are the same gene, but different alleles.

no, pastels are not hets. pastels are heterozygous for pastel, but they are not hets. they are pastels.

"het for" doesn't really make much sense when you think about it. It is not heterozygous for pastel, it is heterozygous pastel. I know it is used all the time, but still.
[/internet nazi]

I do get a chuckle out of the "look at the craigslist ad" posts and they make fun of the poster for terminology that is actually more correct. Regardless of the animal being wrong. While I would never say het pastel in everyday conversation, I think it is important for people to realize they actually are in fact hets and understand what het and homo really are. How many people have you met that had different rules for odds of breeding, depending on if the morph was classified as dom, co-dom/inc-dom, or recessive? Understand what het and homo really is and you can see the classification means nothing, all morphs work the same.