Do cat breeders make money

It's hard to understand how expensive breeding is without actually trying it. Breeding each domestic species is different with different special challenges. With cats, the biggest challenge is preventing and managing infectious disease because cats evolved as loners, almost never in contact with other cats after reaching adulthood.

Cats also tend to start manifesting behavioral problems in a multicat situation. Hence there is no such thing as "economies of scale" when breeding cats. As long as you continue to give the cats all the veterinary care and other things they deserve, the more cats you have, the more expensive it gets.

When a breeder starts breeding for the first time, she has to buy at least one very good female kitten to eventually be used for breeding. This female queen must be registered and have an excellent pedigree. In addition, the queen needs to be an outstanding example of her breed, absolutely sound and cosmetically much better than pet quality.

Outstanding examples of the breed don't grow on trees and so usually the price of a breeding queen is high. Also, it's very unlikely that the new breeder will be able to find and persuade a reputable breeder to sell her a healthy, high quality female unless she has first spent about a year educating herself and networking with more experienced breeders see part G below.

Experienced breeders don't want to sell breeding cats to a newbie without abundant evidence that the newbie will do right by her cats and by the breed. Next, every time a breeder buys a new kitten or cat for breeding she must make certain that cat is healthy and won't transmit any diseases, parasites, or genetic defects to the kittens or to other cats already living in the home.

The veterinary testing includes a physical exam, stool exam for parasites, blood tests FIV, feline leukemia , and it's also wise to do PCR testing for hard-to-detect parasites. The new breeder must either purchase an excellent stud and build him stud quarters very, very expensive and challenging for a newbie - or she must locate a breeder with an excellent stud who is willing to provide stud service.

A responsible stud owner will want to protect her stud from possible exposure to disease. Therefore, even though you had a thorough vet exam of your queen when you first bought her, you will probably be asked to repeat at least the blood tests and show the test results to the stud owner prior to each and every breeding. It's MORE expensive and much more work to keep your own stud, but usually consistent quality stud service is not available and there is no choice. There will be at least one litter per year and at least one kitten kept and registered per year thereafter.

The breeder must buy two or three textbook type reference books to help her learn what she needs to know about making breeding decisions, veterinary screening, genetic screening, rearing kittens, caring for females in heat, caring for pregnant and lactating females, common feline diseases, feline nutrition, and much more.

Visiting the library is not sufficient because the library is unlikely to have books that are up-to-date on feline husbandry - or may not have books on that topic at all. The breeder needs special equipment to rear litters of kittens. Hypothermia is the leading cause of death of young kittens. The breeder needs to advertise kittens, promote her cattery, promote her breed, and network with other breeders.

Breed promotion and networking is not only to help the breeder advertise longterm, but to altruistically help the breed, to help the breeder educate herself, and to provide the breeder with contacts that will help her achieve breeding goals far into the future. The breeder must have a sales contract and other cattery forms, a cattery brochure with which to answer written inquiries, may need business cards, and must take photos of breeding cats and all kittens for cattery documentation, advertising, and other purposes.

The breeder must make many phone calls, including long distance phone calls, as a courtesy in returning calls received from kitten clients and even those merely curious about the breed. The breeder must also do longterm follow-up on every kitten sold, telephoning new owners regularly to answer questions and nip problems in the bud. Food, litter, routine veterinary bills, and other basic maintenance costs will vary depending on the quality of the food and litter, the number of toys and special furniture items purchased for the cat s and more.

A queen can only be bred for 1 to 2 litters per year for years after which she must be spayed and retired. Every breeder may begin with one queen, but eventually there will be other queens, perhaps one or two studs, retirees, and a cat or two of any age that was too special to the breeder to adopt out or that was unadoptable because of health or behavioral problems.

Even though they retire some of their adult cats early and adopt them out into loving homes, breeders sooner or later accumulate more elderly cats than a pet owner usually would, with the result that their yearly expenses for taking care of their beloved retirees and pensioners can be substantial. Even adopting cats out all cats while still young is not a financial solution and certainly not an easy solution from an emotional perspective! In addition, an occasional new breeding cat will prove to be unbreedable for various reasons and the effort and expense of finding a replacement must be repeated yet again.

Even once you have the kittening equipment and other overhead expenses taken care of, there are additional costs incurred per litter. Queen must be vaccinated right before she is bred or in some cases during the pregnancy. Queen will eat up to twice as much as usual during her pregnancy and up to three times as much as usual while she is nursing the kittens.

She needs special premium quality food that is approved for pregnancy and lactation. That is two 6-ounce cans per day for 9 weeks of pregnancy and 3 cans per day for at least 8 weeks of lactation. Kittens can die within hours if they don't get enough to eat because of a feeding problem. So you need to keep emergency formula, feeding tubes, and feeding syringes on hand. The kittens will begin to eat solid food at age weeks and will be eating almost entirely solid food at age 8 weeks.

What they don't eat, they spill soil, scatter, or play with until it must be discarded. The kittens will stay with the breeder usually until age 12 weeks - and sometimes for much longer. The kittens will require at least two vaccinations, one at age 9 weeks and one at age 12 weeks. Each kitten must be spayed or neutered prior to adoption. This is responsible breeding that prevents new owners from unintentionally failing to neuter kittens in time to prevent accidental litters.

Breeders aim to preserve their breeds but they also wish to avoid adding to the numbers of homeless cats on the streets and in shelters. The reason there are only four kittens neutered, and not five, is because the breeder nearly always keeps one kitten from each litter to see if it will have potential as a future breeding or show cat.

Dog Breeders Guide - For Dogs Lovers and Breeders

Obviously, in many cases the kitten does not realize its potential and thus is eventually placed in a home as a pet, but placed at a later age it may have to be sold for almost nothing. In virtually all litters there is at least one kitten who during his 12 weeks living with the breeder requires veterinary attention due to an umbilical infection, failure to thrive normally, getting poked in the eye, falling off a table the wrong way, developing an upper respiratory infection, developing a minor eye infection during the period when the eyes are starting to open, needing a re-examination after neutering, being born with a minor birth defect, developing a mysterious limp, swallowing a foreign object, or many other possible calamities.

Kittens are like small human children. They have a talent for getting themselves into scrapes or picking up bugs. Occasionally, the queen requires a C-section to deliver her kittens or may require treatment after the birth of the kittens due to lactational diarrhea, intestinal obstruction, mastitis, hemorrhaging, uterine infection, or other complications.

Also, if C-section is required up to half of the litter may die due to side effects of the anesthesia.

Kittens may also be lost due to the effects of complications on the queen's milk production. Since she only produced one litter per year, you have to subtract the cost of her support from the litter income: And of course in reality you didn't get a best-case scenario from every litter she produced.

But let's suppose you did Oh, and Uncle Sam won't let you deduct your cattery expenses as business expenses because it will turn out you never make a profit. But we're not done.

Remember that due to the occasional accident of nature, you may also end up with at least one unadoptable kitten, a kitten with a special health or behavioral problem, to which you must give a lifetime of love and good care. That adds to the richness of your emotional experience with the cats, but it also costs you a lot more. And we haven't even talked about what it would cost you if you were showing your cats several times per year at cat shows!

Well, you say, maybe if you buy more than one breeding queen and start raising more litters per year, THEN you can make a profit. Unfortunately, it turns out that with cats the more breeding cats you have living together, the higher your costs climb. First of all, you absolutely can bet you won't have a best-case scenario with all the litters produced by every cat, so you will be much more in debt from some cats than others.

You can also bet that a percentage of the breeding cats you buy will turn out to be unbreedable, will die unexpectedly, will develop pyometra and have their reproductive lives cut short, and so on.

As the number of cats you buy climbs beyond about one, you will find that it becomes nearly impossible to continue to get by with stud service.

There aren't many breeders who will offer stud service and who have a high quality stud and who are located near you. In fact, there may not be any. And if you have multiple queens, you can't be shipping them ALL long distances on a regular basis. Also, your stud service provider may be unable to offer you all the stud services you need WHEN you need them.

So you buy a stud. That means you have to have special stud housing that will cost you at least several hundred dollars in materials and several hundred more in equipment e. Now you also have to maintain the stud year-round whether he is siring litters or not. And you have to hire someone to care for him while you are out of town.

Studs are not cats you can leave in the hands of just anyone, especially if they spray urine heavily on a daily basis. If you have multiple queens, you will begin to have some problems with them getting along.

In some cases, that may mean you have to spay one and adopt her out to keep the peace. And you may suddenly have extra vet trips to help you differentiate and treat behavioral versus medical problems. With multiple queens often several of them will come into heat at once. If allowed to roam the house, the wailing will drive you and possibly your neighbors to distraction. Queens in heat also tend to spray urine on furniture.

It's easy to monitor the behavior of just one queen in heat and leave her free to roam, but when you have several queens in heat that's not feasible. You have to confine them during each heat cycle. You will need more kittening equipment, such as multiple heating pads, because often more than one queen will have kittens at the same time. You will need to remodel portions of your home. When you have multiple breeding cats and several litters of kittens born per year, you need rooms in which to separately isolate young fragile litters.

You need cleanable, bleachable surfaces so you can disinfect because having litters around all the time greatly increases the risk of infectious disease. It becomes extremely difficult to keep carpets clean in a house of multiple cats, especially with young ones underfoot all the time, so you need to replace the carpets with Pergo or tile or similar cleanable surface.

You need to get rid of the lacy curtains because young kittens can poke their heads through them and strangle themselves. You need to replace your old furniture with furniture you can easily clean.

Yes, you can keep the home sanitary and odorless when you have multiple breeding cats. You can keep the cats happy and healthy. But it will require remodeling.

It will cost you money. When you only have one queen and one litter per year you can work around the limitations of your home. But once you have multiple cats and multiple litters per year, you can't.

The remodeling will cost you thousands of dollars. Just replacing all the carpets with Pergo or tile can cost ten thousand dollars. With multiple cats and multiple litters you will, despite the best of vaccination and quarantine systems, occasionally end up with epidemics.

Those may be minor or they may be serious, but they always mean large vet bills. It's very much like running a day-care center full of young children who succumb to every new virus and bug that's out there. When you only have one queen and one litter per year, you have very minimal vet bills, but once you graduate to multiple breeding cats and litters, the vet bills can be substantial.

Cats evolved to live by themselves most of the time. Consequently, they are very susceptible to epidemic diseases, much more so than dogs. So why do breeders bother to breed multiple cats and litters? Because they want to keep the breed going and also hopefully improve its health and appearance.

You can't accomplish much for a breed when breeding only one cat.

When you buy a kitten from a reputable breeder, you are helping the breeder with some of the expenses of breeding so she or he can keep the breed going. Bird of Sarsenstone Cattery. You may link to this document, but you may not redistribute it in any form without the express written consent of the copyright holder. Why Is This Kitten So Much?

Previous Litters Breed History.

The cost of Breeding Cats

THE COSTS PER LITTER Even once you have the kittening equipment and other overhead expenses taken care of, there are additional costs incurred per litter. Stud fee and health screening discussed in part I section C above. INCOME FROM ONE LITTER OF KITTENS A. So much for the "profits" in cat-breeding. How To Find A MC Kitten. Pet's Bill of Rights. I Am Famous Now. Rules for Stray Cats.