Varieties

Coats

Breeds - General Remarks

The following coat varieties are currently recognized in Finnish standards: short hair (SH), satin (*S), astrex (*A), long hair (LH), abyssinian (AB), fuzzy (fz), combinations of these (with the exception of curled abyssinians and astrex fuzzy); and nude (NU).

There are specific standards written only for the basic coat types:. In order to get the idea of a, say, long hair satin astrex, one needs to 'combine' the standards for long hair, satin and astrex.

Some mouse varieties look their best in certain coat varieties, as well as some coat varieties look their best in certain colour varieties. The standards were originally written for short hair (also called "normal" or "standard" coat) mice and different coat varieties affect the colors slightly.

All coat varieties are more or less regularly shown in Finland, with the short hair and short hair satin classes being the largest. The long hair and curled varieties are showed in smaller numbers.

General

The normal coat variety of a mouse is short hair. In all other coat varieties the colour and markings should be as near as possible the standard laid down for that variety. However, the effect of the coat on the colour/markings should be taken into consideration. All colour and marked varieties are recognized in all coat varieties.

The letters given in parentheses after the name of the variety are the genes responsible for that variety. If there is nothing mentioned, they are unknown at the moment.

Other Countries

The coat varieties and genes causing them found in Finland are not by any means the only ones available! There are a number of other curly coat genes and different long hair genes around, so depending on your location, those described here may not be available, while something else is. Do take this into account when reading the breed pages, as especially different curly coat genes can act quite differently with pretty different results than those in our standards.

Furthermore, names for mouse breeds are not universally uniform. For example the Swedish Mouse Club (Svenska Musklubben) calls our Long Hair Astrex "Texel", while the mouse fanciers in Netherlands call frizzie-derived (that is, recessive) curly coat + long hair "Texel" and the recessive curly coat variety "Rex".