How To Choose Breeder Cats
Select a Strong Foundation for Feline Breeding Programs
Purchasing the kitties that will help start your cattery requires much more than simply picking out two pretty felines.
Pet, Show, or Breeder Quality Cats?
Most breeders categorize their kittens into three different types: Show, Breeder, and Pet. Pet cats will come with a spay or neuter contract, and their registration will not include breeding rights. Show and breeder cats are sold with breeding rights. Show cats are supposed to be perfect to standard, while breeder cats may not be absolutely perfect but will be close and offer potential to your breeding program.
Know Your Breed Standard
In order to choose your breeding stock, you must know your breed standard in and out, backward and forward. Your breeder cat, as mentioned above, may not conform perfectly to standard, so it will be important to be able to recognize not only the positive and negative traits of each cat, but also how your stud and queen will balance out each other’s imperfections. You wouldn’t want to choose a sire and dam who both had the wrong ear type, for example, but if your queen’s ears weren’t just right, you could look for a male that had perfect ears. If you don’t know your breed standard well, you will never be able to choose the proper breeding stock.
Are You Improving Your Breed?
Do not simply purchase whatever cats you can get with breeding rights. Patience is a virtue when it comes to buying your breeder kitties. You will never regret waiting on the perfect cats for your breeding program. Your breeding goal should always be to produce kittens that are improving the breed. You want to make sure that you are improving any problems that exist within the breed, including conformation to standard, health, and temperament. There are other considerations specific to each breed.
Breed for Health
Health is extremely important! You must know any breed specific health problems and make sure that the cattery where you purchase your cats screens for all inherited or breed specific health problems and provides proper veterinary care for their own breeding stock. If you intend to be a reputable and responsible breeder, you will offer a health guarantee, a legally binding contract, to all your kitten buyers. You can’t safely do that if you haven’t started with perfectly healthy cats. Make sure you get all your cats checked out by the vet within the given time constraints of your health contract, regardless of how much you might trust the seller.
Temperament Matters!
Whenever you research feline breeds, you will notice that each breed has personality traits that make them desirable to adopting families. Temperament is a large part of what makes us choose the breed we love. It is important that your breeding cats have a temperament that you will want to pass on to their kittens. Shy, skittish, nervous, anxious, or aggressive cats should never be bred. If your breed temperament calls for playful, family-oriented cats, that is exactly what your adopting families are expecting from the kitten they purchase from you. Make sure that’s what you give them!
Keeping Kittens You Have Produced
If you’ve chosen good foundation breeders and produced kittens that are to standard, healthy, and have a wonderful temperament, you will no doubt want to keep some of your own kittens as part of your breeding stock. Remember, however, that you will not want to breed them back to their own father in most circumstances, so you will need to have another male available to breed them with. Sometimes this requires breeders to lease a male, seek stud service from another cattery, or purchase a second male out of their bloodline. All of these possibilities come with their own set of problems, and it is beneficial to have options planned out well in advance.
Be a Smart Buyer!
When you are ready to purchase your breeding cats, beware of anyone who is too eager to sell you a cat with breeding rights. Some disreputable breeders will sell their problem cats to unsuspecting new cattery owners, as well as marking their hard-to-place kittens as breeder quality at a very cheap price in order to place them more quickly. A reputable cattery will screen you thoroughly and will only offer breeding rights to a select few. If you unknowingly buy poor quality or unhealthy cats, you will produce and sell poor quality and unhealthy kittens, which will quickly ruin your reputation. Be smart from the start so that you don’t suffer through a couple of years of trial and error that can bankrupt a new cattery before you ever get started!
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Source:
Darlene Cheek, Persian Cat Breeder, Tennessee Persians
