Perhaps one of the most difficult questions a breeder can be asked is: ‘Can you guarantee that the kitten will be healthy?’
It is very tempting to give a simple answer.
Yes.
But the honest answer is no.
I can do a great deal to reduce the risks. I can select matings, look at the health of relatives, avoid repeating unsuccessful combinations, remove animals from breeding if I see a problem, test breeding cats and spend years following what appears in subsequent generations.
But I cannot guarantee the health of a living creature for fifteen or twenty years.
No one can.
When someone comes to a cattery for a kitten, they usually see the end point.
A beautiful little kitten. Its parents. A pedigree. Sometimes titles, test results and photographs of relatives.
They do not see the path the cattery travelled to reach that kitten.
That path is far from always being sweet.
Every cattery that has existed for long enough has its own graveyard.
Even I find it difficult to write that sentence, but it is true.
There are no catteries in which every animal is always healthy, never becomes ill and invariably dies at the age of twenty-five solely from extreme old age. There are no perfect lines in which nothing has ever happened over decades.
Animals become ill. Sometimes they die young. Sometimes a problem appears only after several years. Sometimes one case looks like chance, and then something similar happens to a relative — and you begin to look at that line in an entirely different way.
I have had such stories too.
Once, in the cattery’s fairly early lines, I was told that a very young graduate had died. His owner said that a panel of vets had met and concluded that the kitten had some developmental abnormality of the internal organs.
I never learnt what the abnormality actually was.
I received no report. I did not receive an exact diagnosis with which I could work in future either.
Yet a conclusion appeared very quickly: ‘Maria breeds kittens with abnormalities.’
Situations like this are especially difficult for a breeder, and not only because it is unpleasant to hear an accusation.
First and foremost, I need to understand what happened.
Who were this animal’s parents? Is there anything similar among its brothers and sisters? Has it occurred in other descendants? Do I need to remove someone from breeding? Avoid repeating a particular combination? Watch the line more closely?
Without a diagnosis, it is impossible to answer those questions.
Sometimes the answers appear only years later.
Very recently, the owner of another of my graduates wrote to me. The cat had died at eight years old. He had problems with his urinary system and a tendency towards cystitis; he was kept on a particular food, but in the end he still passed away.
She was not making a complaint. She simply asked: ‘Do Selkirks generally live such short lives?’
I answered honestly that I did not know.
What exact answer could there be?
Eight years is young. But the death of one cat cannot support the conclusion that Selkirks live for eight years.
At the same time, his brother had a similar tendency towards urinary problems. He too has since died.
Two similar cases in close relatives are already information that I cannot simply discard.
Both cats came from my early lines. As kittens they were, of course, bred by me. But I had once acquired the breeding male for that line from another cattery.
That does not mean that I can point to a particular animal today and say, ‘This is where the problem came from.’
I cannot.
I can only suppose that the early line or that particular combination genuinely carried a predisposition that was later removed through further selection.
I have not seen the same pattern in later generations for many years.
This is a very important point for me.
From the outside, breeding work is sometimes imagined roughly as follows: a breeder chooses two healthy cats and then obtains healthy kittens.
In practice, it is far more complicated.
Some problems are not visible in the breeding animal itself. They may appear in its descendants. Some become noticeable only with age. Sometimes a suspicion arises only after the second or third similar case.
That is when the real work begins.
Not: ‘I guaranteed everything.’
But: I saw it. Remembered it. Compared the cases. Looked at the relatives. Drew conclusions. Changed the combination. Did not retain a particular animal for breeding. Altered the direction of the programme. Then watched the results for several more generations.
Sometimes the health of a line can be improved much more than you expected at the beginning.
But even very successful selection does not turn a living creature into a product with a guaranteed service life.
To me, therefore, a good cattery is not one in which nothing bad has happened in twenty years.
Such a cattery simply does not exist.
What distinguishes a good cattery is what happens after a problem is discovered.
Does the breeder pretend that nothing happened?
Blame the owner?
Or gather information, look at relatives, change breeding decisions and try to prevent the problem from continuing?
The last of these is what responsibility means to me.
What, then, can a breeder genuinely guarantee?
They can honestly disclose everything significant they know about a particular kitten and its line.
They can test breeding animals where doing so is meaningful.
They can avoid knowingly using animals with problems they consider significant for breeding.
They can follow their graduates and draw conclusions when owners report important information.
They can spend years selecting for health and adjusting the programme.
All this reduces risks.
Sometimes very substantially.
But reducing them to zero is impossible.
I cannot promise that a particular kitten will never become ill.
I cannot say that it will certainly live for eighteen or twenty years.
I cannot guarantee that in ten years it will not develop an illness that has never appeared in the line before.
This is not a refusal to accept responsibility.
It is biology.
Your kitten may live for twenty years. It may become ill much sooner. It may encounter something that the breeder has never seen before in their animals.
That in itself does not mean that you were deceived or that the cattery ‘breeds sick animals’.
Perhaps the most honest guarantee a good breeder can give is therefore not this:
‘Nothing will ever happen to your animal.’
It is closer to this:
‘I shall do everything I know and can do to reduce the risks. And if I learn about a problem, I shall not pretend that it does not exist.’
