ranting...
Grr...I hate people who talk shit about pedigreed cats and breeders. It really pisses me off almost more than anything else. People buy pedigreed cats because they want a kitten that is healthy, well-socialized, and has certain characteristics that cannot be guaranteed to be found in a domestic cat. Granted, there are a lot of "backyard breeders" and kitten mills, but there are far more dog people like this than cat people. I realize that there are cats and dogs that get put to sleep in shelters every day and that there is an overpopulaton of pets, but really most cats or dogs get taken to shelters for a reason, and most often that reason is because of things like poor bathroom habits or agression. Travelling to cat shows, I have heard story after story about people who have adopted a cat or a kitten for $60, then it ended up having some serious illness and the $60 kitten quickly turned into a $1500 kitten. Granted, I don't know much about dogs, but with cats, the pedigreed cats make up less than 1% of the cat population in the entire world. So it's kind of like protecting an endangered species. Also, I don't know one breeder who sells their kittens or cats without them already being spayed or neutered, or selling them on a spay/neuter contract. So it's not like we're making kittens and giving people the opportunity to make more of them, unlike people whose domestic cats will have a litter and then they scramble to find the kittens homes, and very rarely will those kittens be spayed or neutered. Domestic cats are the problem, not the people who breed pedigreed cats. I just wish that people would be more educated on things like early spay/neuter and that more cities would have either low or no cost spay/neuter clinics where people can bring in the cats from their neighborhood and have them spayed or neutered. It would be a tax dollar well spent.