Well, the abyssinian first came into the UK in 1868. Ticked tabby is dominant and all else being equal, you would expect to see far mroe ticked tabbies than all other tabbies put together. And round here, at least, you just don't see moggie ticked tabbies.

I'm wondering along these lines:

If we assume (not necessarily a valid assumption but let's assume it anyway) that there were no ticked tabbies in the UK before 1868, and if we assume again that the Abyssinians were taken straight into the care of a dedicated cat breeder, the question would then arise of how quickly it would take released heterozygote offspirng of these cats to spread their genes around the UK.

Now one has to bear in mind a few things. First, kitten drowning was the normal and only means of feline population control in those days and remained the norm for about 100 years. Second, in the days before everyone had a car, people would not normally have travelled miles to obtain a non-pedigree kitten, especially in the days when kitten supply greatly exceeded demand. So movement of domestic cats per generation would perhaps have been limited to a mile or so in any direction. Third, any cats that were abandoned and survived would have contributed to the gene pool of a feral population and those genes would have been spreading fairly freely but only with a movement of a couple of miles per generation.

So, imagine that the abyssinians brought the ticked tabby allele into the UK and that they were first introduced into a cat breeding establishment in one of the ports, how long would it take for this dominant allele to have spread throughout the UK? Which leads to two possible further questions:

1. If the ticked tabby allele has not yet had time to spread throughout the UK, is it more concentrated in some parts than others? (there could be a PhD here for someone!) - or
2. If the ticked tabby allele has had time to spread through the UK, why don't we see moggy ticked tabbies?

Since I can think of no possible selection mechanism that would select against ticked tabbies (rather the reverse in fact, anyone contemplating drowing a litter of kittens in the late 19th - first 70 years of the twentieth centuries, and choosing to keep one kitten back for the children / for a neighbour wanting a kitten / for the sake of the mother cat, would surely have been far more likely to have selected an unusual patterned cat than say a black and white cat or even a mackerel tabby.), I think the most likely explanation has to be that the allele hasn't spread far enough.

Do I have a potential PhD thesis, do you think? LOL!