Originally Posted by russmania

Leslie and all..........

I guess, accept it or not, cat fancy, or the whole idea of purebred cat registry, grounds on the belief (assumption?) that we are living in a world of trust and civilisation..............

The fact that this practice (cat registry) is successful, or to a large degree sound doesn't necessarily mean that it will work in other parts of the planet where people are, in general, less educated, less civilised and fraud is part of the daily life..........

A good example - mainland China. You have heard, almost never-endingly, stories about fake products including foods (gosh that includes milk powder for babies), right? So if those people give no damn even about making fake or substandard food products that they know better than anyone else that these will do harm to people eating them (and baby these people in China are uncountable), how can we expect there will be a high degree of a mature, mutual-trusting system running in such a nation. And if fraud is such a common phenomenon in there, you cannot expect the pet market, which extends of course to the practice of pedigreed cat breeding, will have a totally different kind of civilisation. And mind you, I run my own architectural studio with a lot of projects in China and I have dealt with many different walks of life there, and I can tell you fraud is still common these days. That siad, of course I've seen good people in there as well, but in the end it's a simple rule that determines how civilised a place is: the no. of well-behaved people against the bad ones..........and in China this ratio is still a little on the low side.

Are there frauds in pedigreed breeding in the western world? Of course surely yes, but again the western world seems to be more prone to self-correction as a result of, in my mind, a more general ethical belief. The problem of non-ethical breeding will continue to exist, as long as there is a gap in the spirit of breeding (ethics) and the reality (frauds). To many, many BYB the temptation to breed for money, more money is just so huge.............

One more than though, I myself always make sure my cats are free from common genetic issues like HCM, PKD (not common in Forests and yet I still want to be sure). There is a lab in Australia which you can get the PKD test-kit for perhaps 200RM and you can collect some tissues sample from your cat's tongue and sent it to the lab for testing. Just two weeks you'll get your result back. Of course if you want this result to be officially recognised you'll need a Vet to do the sampling, and yet it won't cost you an arm or a leg anyway. My other practice is, while it may sound like a pain in the ass for many but I always find it enjoying, "trace it up" to as many as 10 generations when I buy breeding cats from other breeders. In doing that I can see the development of a line including the change (better say evolution) of type, size, and coat condition ---- I also incidentally spot HCM carriers in the line (Some domains contain info. for known HCM carriers) so I know pretty much what to prevent or at least the level of risk to take if I really, really like the cat concerned...........

Are you guys doing the same thing?