These are the handsome boys who live here with us or have contributed to our breeding program. We generally have two to three males active at a time, and those waiting for their turn or who have been important to us are listed as well.
We do things a little differently than a lot of breeders, because we feel very strongly that cats deserve a very long retirement period being beloved family pets, and we work very hard to be able to pivot away from pedigrees if there is any problem that we’re worries is inherited. We also feel strongly that we have a responsibility to avoid inbreeding and keep our breeding program diverse over the long term. So instead of, say, keeping one boy and five girls and expecting to breed them together repeatedly for two years, we will have two or three boys and twice that many girls, and retire them as soon as we have something we want to move on with. That means it’s difficult for us to keep individual cat pages updated, because the time between we make a final decision that “Yep, this handsome dude has passed all his health testing and we know the wisest and best way to breed him,” and “Wow, he did a wonderful job and now he gets to go be in charge of his own house” might be only six or eight months. After a few years of feeling like we were always behind, we decided to list our boys by family rather than try to keep things perfectly current. These are the terrific boy families that live here:
It’s very important to us to treat our breeding males well. In order to prevent uncontrolled breeding and to keep the females healthy, the Siberian boys must be separated from the girls – but they deserve human contact and the joy of being a house cat just like the girls do.
What we have landed on as a compromise is (literally) a divided house. We have a large room dedicated to keeping cats very happy, with trees and condos and hammocks and toys galore, and we rotate the girls and boys every two weeks. During “boy weeks,” when the males are in the people side of the house, we’re covered in heavy, purring giants who sprawl over all the surfaces and lift their heads only to blink at us contentedly. During “girl weeks,” while the boys settle in the cat room, we play every game known to catdom, keeping the bright and inquisitive girls occupied and interested.
