When I first started in the mouse fancy at the beginning of 2009, my chosen variety was dove self. Experienced fanciers told me that I'd never get anywhere with them and that I should choose something else, but I persevered because I found them so beautiful. I was firm believer that you have to love what you're breeding since you're looking at 50 mice of the same variety, day in, day out, and in any case winning wasn't that important to me... Or so I thought!

Following all of the advice given in books I bred my first dove selfs from argentes, champagnes and silvers (I later found out this was a big mistake). I got dove selfs in the first generation and I thought they were absolutely beautiful. At weaning time, I was giving them a thorough look over and noticed for the very first time the raging, fluorescent orange all over the vents, behind the ears, and even round the nipples and ankles. “Right,” I thought to myself, “how on Earth do I sort this out?” I decided to look through the yearbook and came across Dave Safe's advert which said “if I can help you, I will”. So I rang him up. He very kindly spent nearly an hour talking to me and giving me so much advice, which I furiously scribbled down in my mouse breeding logbook. He suggested that I look for a dark silver buck of excellent type to out-cross my doves. This I duly did, and I contacted Heather McLean. Heather very kindly invited me down to visit Loganberry Stud to have a look at her mice. I took £20 with me to buy a trio of silvers. We spent a good few hours going through Heather's stock and I learned so much. She showed me so many examples and pointed out what was good and bad about each mouse. Due to Heather's generosity I came back with two or three silver bucks, about eight silver does, and greatly renewed enthusiasm. When I got home, I sat and wrote down everything I had learned that day, complete with diagrams showing ear-set and the like. I bred some of Heather's silvers together and out-crossed my doves with the mice remaining. The resulting doves were pale (although not pale enough for silver) and the tan hairs were greatly reduced. I carried on blending the resulting colours, trying to get my mice darker.

It was about this time that I realised my original mistake. Had I known at the beginning what I know now, I would have used blacks and silvers, and avoided champagne altogether. The pesky chocolate gene was making my beautiful dove mice a muddy puddle colour and ruining the clear, morning-suit grey for which I was aiming. All of the champagnes were culled and I tried to remove the mice which I knew carried champagne from my breeding programme. This was to no avail, the chams just kept on coming.

While I was trying to sort this out, I was also finding that I could not get good dove self mice with vents as clean and type as good as the silvers. Every time the colour got anywhere the right shade, the type weakened and the tan vents came back! Eventually I needed another silver buck from Heather, which she kindly gave me, along with another little hint that maybe I should give up on the doves and breed something with which I could win. My doves were regularly winning their class but never got anywhere in the challenges and, although I was not bothered to start with, I was starting to care about winning.

As my last attempt to make these dove selfs right, I thought I'd try a black out-cross and I got some quality stock from Phil Arnold. These mice had no tan on their vents and I was positive that by breeding these to silvers with clean vents and then breeding the F1 blacks back to silvers, I would get the right shade of dove and eliminate the tan vents. No. The silvers were still coming out clean but the doves had disgusting vents just like they always had. I was starting to feel very frustrated and I'd come to the conclusion that for some reason doves just can't compare to PEW/silver/champagne. I'd had about eighty litters of dove/silver at this point and in every single litter the silvers had been better mice than the doves in every way.

Above: Photographs showing the tan vents on a dove mouse, compared with the clean vents on a silver mouse.

It all came to a head when I gave in and showed some silvers for the first time. I was sure that my silvers were routinely better than the doves, but I realised I was looking at them with novice eyes and should get an experienced opinion. The first silver I showed won BOA self under Terry Thorne, and it's dove sisters got nowhere. So what I was seeing seemed to be correct. I started thinking it all through. Across all the varieties, the biggest, most typey mice are those with the least pigment and the smallest mice (excluding marked) are the mice with the most pigment. Dove is thought of as a 'pale self' but it's actually a lot darker and has a lot more pigment than all of the other pale selfs. What if the concentration of pigment needed to produce the correct shade of dove results in a smaller mouse? Would that mean that expecting dove to look like a 'pale self' wouldn't be achievable and therefore dove could never win? It would be almost like expecting a black or blue to be that big and still have the correct colour.

Whatever the reason for it, whether it was a lack of skill on my part or an impossibility in the variety itself, I could not succeed with dove self. But although I failed I certainly feel that the couple of years I worked with them were not wasted. I learned so much from them and the other fanciers from whom I asked advice. I really think that failing with these mice made me a much better fancier in the long run!