Practical Cat Breeding Advice for New Breeders

When someone lands on your cattery website, they should be able to work out three things almost immediately. What breed do you have? Where are you located? And who are you?

If they have to hunt for any of that information, the website isn’t doing its most basic job.

A good cattery website should h...

Yes. Being interested in one of your kittens doesn’t give someone an automatic right to have one.

As cat breeders, many of us are caring people. We have empathy, we want to make people happy and we know how much someone may want a kitten. That can make it very easy to fall into the trap of thinking...

One of the questions I was asked in my Q&A post was what extra support I provide for the runt of the litter. My first answer is that I don’t use the word runt.

I know what people usually mean when they say it. They mean the smallest kitten in the litter, the one that is not as big, not as round, or...

One of the questions I was asked in my Q&A post was how long after desexing a stud cat can come into the house if he’s still spraying.

This question came from Neri, who is a member of my New Cat Breeders Club. She has Burmese, and that detail matters because breed can make a difference. Some cats a...

One of the questions I get asked a lot is whether cat breeders should immunise kittens themselves or take them to the vet to be vaccinated.

My answer is easy. I take my kittens to the vet.

I’ve never done my own kitten vaccinations. I’m perfectly capable of doing it, and I could access the vaccine...

One of the questions I was asked in a recent Q&A post on my socials was what top five products, platforms or tools have been life changing or time saving in my cattery, and what I think every breeder should have from day one.

I love this question because the honest answer is probably not the answer...

Here is something a lot of new cat breeders don’t realise. Your seasonal breeding queens may start calling in the middle of winter, not because winter feels like breeding season to us, but because the cats have noticed something we haven’t really noticed yet.

In Australia, around the 21st of June, ...

Every now and then someone says something that completely changes the way you think about something you've been doing for years. That happened to me recently after another British Shorthair breeder shared an infographic showing three kittens. One represented the breed standard, one was a more modera...

When people first start thinking about becoming a cat breeder, they usually focus on one thing: finding breeding cats.

They spend hours looking at websites, searching for breeders, studying pedigrees, and trying to work out where their first breeding cat is going to come from. On the surface, that ...

Yes, you can breed a cat without registration, because any entire cat can physically reproduce if it has the opportunity. Entire simply means the cat has not been desexed, spayed, or neutered. So if you put an entire male and an entire female together, the cats are not going to stop and ask whether ...

One of the most common questions I hear from new breeders is, "What makes a good breeding cat?"

The interesting thing is that after more than 20 years of breeding cats, importing cats, showing cats, judging cats, and helping, new breeders get started my answer is probably very different from what m...

Yes, you can absolutely breed cats successfully from home. I've been doing it for more than 20 years and I've done it in two very different environments. I bred cats from a suburban house with neighbours on all sides, and I'm breeding cats from home now on a semi rural property. What I've learned ov...