I felt I had to write something about this. I do hear this phrase from time to time, and it gives me a really bad feeling.
Let me first start by letting you know about my country, and how we define breeding!
Breeding is not just producing cute kittens; breeding is selecting for the best to go into a breeding program, to evaluate for a longer time.
It's testing the parents for all the diseases in the breed for MCO, HD with x-ray, and HCM with Ultrasound at 1, 2, 3, and 5 years of age to do what we can to prevent those diseases.
We usually do not repeat matings. What I mean by this is that if we mate Male A and Female B, we will not mate those again, unless we only get 1 kitten, or maybe we really want a male from that mating and get only females, or something else happens. But we do not do the mating again, just because, if you understand what I mean, those that repeat the same mating over and over again are called "kitten-producers" and are not looked upon with kind eyes!
Every litter shall be done with the intention of 1 or 2 kittens going into a breeding program. Of course, there are times when this does not happen for one reason or another, but the intention should not be to produce pet-kittens out of every single litter; around 80% will be pets anyway.
To keep a healthy gene pool, we would need 100 females and 35 males that are all used equally, no one used more than the other!
As you can understand, the healthiest thing is for us all to bring new individuals from all kinds of different lines into the gene pool.
So when I hear breeders saying, I do not sell with breeding rights at all, I have a lot of questions:
- How did you start breeding?
(I would guess someone sold you a cat WITH breeding rights, don't you think it's your responsibility to do the same for others?) - Sooner or later, you will need new cats. What then?
(What if we ALL decide that NOPE, we will not sell with breeding rights... bye bye the MCO breed then, since no one will be able to get cats with breeding rights). - Do you keep one or two kittens from every litter yourself?
(If so, I'm not sure how healthy your group is, since doing so would mean you soon will have a LOT of cats!) - Or do you sell every single kitten as a pet?
(If so, what's your contribution to the gene pool?)
