Please, all those who battle so hard to explain the difference between a (say) persian and a DLH, be gentle with me! I've seen this issue debated SO many times, but I really feel that it's time to put the thing into focus as perhaps most of the rest of the world perceives the situation which arises so often!

I've seen SO many nondescript kittens on the forum with varying lengths of coat (and face!) which no doubt ARE DLH - in our terms, perhaps some are 'part pedigree'. But I've seen other cats which merely look like pet quality (or less) persians.

In the case of some, I'll bet DNA parentage testing would prove they are indeed 'persian', but the point here is that they are of unknown (or unverified) parentage and not registered anywhere, so they can't claim to be PEDIGREED. Different thing altogether.

Think this one through. If I were to breed a litter of exotics which I didn't register and for which I didn't issue pedigrees, would they cease to be exotics? No, I suggest! But they certainly couldn't be proven to be legit pedigree cats, because of the absence of the required paperwork.

Type doesn't always determine whether a cat is actually a specific breed or not (back to the eg of me selling unregistered exotics - they could still look to be very talented exotics, just as could exotics with long faces and long bodies can be 'legit'- they're still exotics, but simply bad ones!)

So, what I'm suggesting is that perhaps we might refer to 'pedigree' and 'non-pedigree'. The latter might look pretty and make nice pets, but they have no provenance, there's no record of their heritage and as such, they should NEVER be bred from, can't be shown as any particular breed and should cost relatively little! It's all a matter of cat fancy convention and rules, rather than appearance of the cat.

THis is just me explaining how the rest of the world perceives the situation which is so prevalent in S E Asia.

Oh, dear - where did I put my flak jacket??????????????? (Jay - be gentle with me!)

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Lesley (Tasmania)