Did you have a mentor? Why or why not?
A breeding mentor is someone who has agreed to teach you how to show and breed cats. This usually involves buying a show quality cat to show as an alter while the mentor gets to know you and impart their years and thousands of dollars of knowledge. The mentor is not paid; you only adopt a quality cat that they could just have easily adopted to anyone else. This is “get to know you” time and NOT a guarantee that they will sell you a breeding cat. If you get the alter and time and time again demonstrate you are not willing to learn, they will not trust you with their bloodlines.
Mentors are agreeing to spend hundreds of hours teaching you for the price of two cats they could have sold and been done with, so don’t think it is about the money. They often have this requirement because we are contacted hundreds of times from people that want to buy a breeding cat but are not willing to do any research about anything. Literally 99% of the people who contact us are idiots that can’t do a basic Google search on their phone. This is how you prove you are the 1% who will care about your cats and gain a reputation as a good cat owner. And most of us will pass. We have our own families, cats, and adopters and don’t have the time to do this so we ONLY sell breeding cats to current reputable breeders that show, and we know them personally because we’ve seen each other or have mutual friends that show.
The ULTIMATE insult is to ask a breeder for a cat, go with someone else who is cheaper, and then expect the original breeder to mentor you. We have no responsibility to mentor someone who went with a different breeder, especially if that cat shows up with major faults.
Do NOT be creeping over our shoulders to look at our grooming, grooming is part of mentoring and most breeders spent years and thousands of dollars on products figuring out what worked for our cats. If a breeder offers advise, that’s fine, and we often just chat about it amongst ourselves because we’ve known each other for years and we know we aren’t showing for the money. But if you show up as a newbie and look over our shoulders, it’s tacky. We can see the thought, “If only I could use your grooming technique it would cover my cats faults, then they’ll get the same awards as your cat and then I can charge show quality price. MUAHAHAHA!” No amount of grooming is going to change a cat’s structure, only enhance it. You can literally find grooming tips from cat show experts on the Internet in less than 5 minutes. This is another way we are bombarded with how much a backyard breeder is not willing to research.
Now, despite all this, I did NOT go with a mentor. Why? As you can see if you’ve read up to this point, I research the shit out of things. I work at a library and read everything I can get my hands on. I do extensive Internet research when available, but also know how to call BS with what I read on the Internet. I have taught myself many things, starting with growing up in Alaska and having to home school myself when the local school with 100 kids in all grades could not offer me advance science and math courses. I sat in the library with my books teaching myself pre-calculus, physics, and Japanese. I started 2 years of math and science courses at college but switched to history after having my daughter and had to learn how to write 20 page papers about one historical event, why it happened, and how to find sources to back it up that argued one way or another. I’ve taught myself many things through books and research. How to make soap, how to knit, how to make ball gowns, how to make butter, how to play the violin, how to home school my child when public schools couldn’t offer her advanced courses.
All of this gave me tools to apply to cat breeding. I read every book I could get my hand on and learned about health and genetic screening of cats. I learned about show titles and how to verify them. I found breeders with titles and verifiable regional wins and awards. There was not an active Scottish fold breeder in the Seattle area at the time I could mentor with at shows, but when contacting some for alters to show they trusted me enough to let me have breeding cats.
And I have gotten those cats international breed wins for those breeders on the TICA website with my cat’s picture that lists both breeder and owner. Forever attached to that cat is the breeder’s name, and I have made it the best in breed in the world. THAT is what breeders care about when trusting someone with their bloodlines. Is this person going to make a good name or bad name for my cat with my name attached to it? Are the kittens of my cats I sell with breeding rights going to be good show cats or will they be an embarrassment at shows where the parents and breeder are publicly listed?
Some new exhibitors have blamed me for not mentoring them as the reason they do poorly, and don’t forget; I have not agreed to mentor anyone. I am the poster child of what is possible if only you spend time (and money) researching and doing what you love. If someone thinks learning about cats is hard or boring, they should seriously not be breeding cats.