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- Aug 13, 2017
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Most people breeding Savannah cats seem to re-home their female cats when they are still young, like 2 or 3 years old, and many males are also retired young or passed onto another breeding program. Breeders seem to want to make sure the breed has enough genetic diversity, and it is impractical to end up with 20 or more retired queens and kings. It doesn't seem likely kittens born to a mom who was never allowed to live out her life in the home she had been brought into as a kitten, would get any inherited personality tendencies from this. But the unneutered males are usually confined to some sort of seperate living area because they spray. I know this is true for other cat breeds as well. Which doesn't seem as good as Mother Nature's system to give an advantage to cats with amazing human social skills or intelligence, at least for the males.
The idea of imposing the life of a cat in a typical breeding program on one of my beloved kitties is very upsetting... but allowing cats to reproduce on their own often results in serious injuries and disease, so no matter how cats reproduce there is a somewhat nasty side to it... So I am not against humans assisting with the breeding of cats. Just I think our well intentioned interventions may have long range consequences, especially if it is happening along side over zealous spay and neuter programs with no clear end goal that stops short of sterilizing all human friendly random bred cats. As I live in an area where this has almost happened, and there is very very few random bred kittens being born, this is something that is happening in some parts of the world. One local business that sells building materials needed a working cat to guard the bales of insulation, but that was also friendly enough to hang out in the same area as customers. They had to travel a day and over 100 miles to find a kitten to adopt that wasn't too feral. And I ended up getting kittens from breeders. Which led me to wonder what role we have now taken on in cats natural long term evolution.
It seems because cats have become members of our families we tend to think of them like they are our kids. But we didn't really create cats... IMO Cats are a naturally occurring species that attached themselves to humans, in a way that seems similar to house mice and rats that originated in Asia. Except cats have social skills. Amazing social skills which they developed by choices made freely by them with encouragement by us, because intimate relationships with humans benefited them. Cats have also naturally interbred with their wild cousins in areas of Africa, Europe, Asia and the UK, so they are all at least partly hybridized somewhere back there. In these areas they are just as much an indigenous species as coyotes in Eastern and Western North America, even though coyotes have expanded their range in a big way over the past few decades.
(PDF) The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world
And while we have always given more protection to kittens with appealing features, only recently have we begun to select cats to mate with each other to create a modified, human controlled animal. So our control of how cats can reproduce is something of an experiment. And while I get it that cats with obvious behavior problems will probably not be selected for breeding programs, on social media I rarely see breeders mention they selected a cat because of it's intelligence or social skills. Usually it is a combination of physical features they hope to retain or enhance. It would be cool if some breeding programs focused mainly on good health and intelligence, or good health and social sensitivity, making note on which of these traits seems inherited, and maybe switching a few kittens to see what may be learned from a different Mom!
The idea of imposing the life of a cat in a typical breeding program on one of my beloved kitties is very upsetting... but allowing cats to reproduce on their own often results in serious injuries and disease, so no matter how cats reproduce there is a somewhat nasty side to it... So I am not against humans assisting with the breeding of cats. Just I think our well intentioned interventions may have long range consequences, especially if it is happening along side over zealous spay and neuter programs with no clear end goal that stops short of sterilizing all human friendly random bred cats. As I live in an area where this has almost happened, and there is very very few random bred kittens being born, this is something that is happening in some parts of the world. One local business that sells building materials needed a working cat to guard the bales of insulation, but that was also friendly enough to hang out in the same area as customers. They had to travel a day and over 100 miles to find a kitten to adopt that wasn't too feral. And I ended up getting kittens from breeders. Which led me to wonder what role we have now taken on in cats natural long term evolution.
It seems because cats have become members of our families we tend to think of them like they are our kids. But we didn't really create cats... IMO Cats are a naturally occurring species that attached themselves to humans, in a way that seems similar to house mice and rats that originated in Asia. Except cats have social skills. Amazing social skills which they developed by choices made freely by them with encouragement by us, because intimate relationships with humans benefited them. Cats have also naturally interbred with their wild cousins in areas of Africa, Europe, Asia and the UK, so they are all at least partly hybridized somewhere back there. In these areas they are just as much an indigenous species as coyotes in Eastern and Western North America, even though coyotes have expanded their range in a big way over the past few decades.
(PDF) The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world
And while we have always given more protection to kittens with appealing features, only recently have we begun to select cats to mate with each other to create a modified, human controlled animal. So our control of how cats can reproduce is something of an experiment. And while I get it that cats with obvious behavior problems will probably not be selected for breeding programs, on social media I rarely see breeders mention they selected a cat because of it's intelligence or social skills. Usually it is a combination of physical features they hope to retain or enhance. It would be cool if some breeding programs focused mainly on good health and intelligence, or good health and social sensitivity, making note on which of these traits seems inherited, and maybe switching a few kittens to see what may be learned from a different Mom!
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