What to Consider Before Breeding Your Cat

1 What to Consider Before Breeding Your Cat

The claim that ‘breeding benefits the mother cat’ is groundless. If a cat must be bred every time she goes into heat, she will stay in a painful cycle of pregnancy and birth—which is truly the more inhumane option?

Are you sure you can find suitable homes for the newborn kittens?

Small-scale home breeders often face this dilemma:

Newborn kittens are adorable and many people come asking for one. If you give a kitten away for free, you’ll worry whether the new owner will truly cherish that free little life;

but if you sell it for money, you’ll feel uneasy, as if you were selling your own child.

If no suitable home is found, are you sure you can raise the kittens yourself?

If your ‘honored mother’ suddenly has octuplets and you cannot find homes for all of them, are you sure you can accept a sharp increase in the number of cats in your home?

If you insist on not spaying/neutering, the cat population will grow geometrically once they reach breeding age. You must consider—with housing so expensive today—whether your home is large enough.

Pre-breeding knowledge: understand your cat’s heat cycle

A cat’s sexual development is affected by nutrition, breed, environment, and individual physical and psychological factors; there is no standard age for first heat. Cats generally reach sexual maturity and begin to cycle between 6 and 12 months, though a few late-maturing breeds may not cycle until after one year.

Female cats are seasonally polyestrous; each heat lasts 3–7 days, and during the breeding season they come into heat about every two weeks, mostly concentrated in March–April and June–July.

Research shows a female cat’s heat is also linked to daylight; in regions with spring-like weather year-round, many females stay in heat almost all year, while male cats have essentially no heat cycle and are only stimulated by a female in heat.

Pre-natal checks: deworming and vaccination in advance

Deworming

Lice and fleas can spread tapeworms and infectious disease; tapeworms and roundworms can pass through the placenta to the fetuses.

For internal parasites, buy a vet-prescribed dewormer and administer it orally; most parasites can be eliminated this way.

For external parasites, there is now a convenient and effective Frontline (fipronil) spot-on solution.

Vaccination

Vaccinate the cat in advance with the FVRCP (feline distemper combo) and rabies vaccines; breeding should only happen about 10 days after the vaccines take full effect, so the mother builds strong antibodies against infectious disease that pass to the kittens through the first milk (colostrum).

Screening for specific diseases

Disease screening is for females that have been bred before but are infertile, abort, or deliver prematurely, or that have had reproductive-system disease.

Items checked include:

(1) Infectious diseases: brucellosis, toxoplasmosis, leptospirosis, etc.

(2) Female reproductive-tract diseases: pyometra, ovarian cysts, endometritis, vaginitis, vulvitis, etc.

Genetic diseases

Genetic diseases can be checked through the cat’s bloodline, including cryptorchidism, cataracts, deafness, diabetes insipidus (congenital), epilepsy, autoimmune disease, and generalized mange (demodicosis).

If a cat is confirmed to have a genetic disease, the breeding plan should stop and the cat should be spayed/neutered. After all, caring for one cat with a genetic disease is easy, but caring for a whole group is far harder.

Choosing a mate: a good match

Believe it or not, many cats have strong opinions about choosing a mate. They often show no interest—even hostility—toward the partner their owner picks, while doting on the one they like.

Therefore, to avoid ‘domestic violence’ between the cat couple, the matching principle should first be built on mutual willingness.

Match by breed

Crossing different breeds is a deep science best left to dedicated feline researchers!

Cross-breeding violates the principle of purebred mating; if exploited by unscrupulous breeders, it harms the breeding quality of the whole breed, and the resulting ‘mixed-breed’ cats may end up as strays on the street.

Match by age

Male cats are usually fully mature at around one and a half years, females at about one year. A female under one year may have an underdeveloped pelvis and risk difficult labor (dystocia).

Although cats are very fertile—some records show individual females still breeding normally at 14—this is exceptional. If a female is over 5 years old with no breeding experience, the risk of false pregnancy and dystocia rises sharply, and the breeding plan should be abandoned.

Match by size

If the male and female differ too much in size, injury may occur during mating.

If the female is very small and the male is robust, difficult labor may occur at delivery, in severe cases threatening the lives of both mother and kittens.

Match by condition

Choosing a male is a bit like a ‘martial-arts bride contest’—a healthy, strong, and handsome male is the first choice, which minimizes genetic disease and fits the core idea of ‘family planning’: healthy birth and good nurture.

Tips:

There is one exception to good matching: when breeding Scottish Fold cats, two folded-ear cats must never be crossed, or the kittens may develop skeletal genetic disease.