Thread: Opinions And Insight: Maine Coon Breeders

Originally Posted by candes

And don't assume that price has anything to do with testing. And it was not polite to suggest this..

I have talked with a pretty large number of breeders over the last several years as we have bought four MCs and there definitely was a connection between price and health testing. I never found a single lower cost cat (<$700) where the breeder was doing echos. Not one! Some claimed to do the HCM gene testing but many had never even heard of that. So unfortunately this is what my experience talking to probably 20 breeders tells me one should expect from $500 vs. $800 breeders. Of course just because people are charging a lot more doesn't necessarily mean they are doing testing either, because most of the high priced breeders are able to charge that price because of their winning lines that are in big demand. I think its great that you found somebody actually doing health testing and selling for <$800, but I think that is going to be very unlikely for most people. My point about the money was that if somebody says they would pay $500 for a kitten but not $700, in the long run that $200 difference is going to be nothing compared to the lifetime expense of the cat. So if you are actually getting something for your money (like yearly echos of the parents) then I don't find the extra cost unreasonable. Buying a kitten should not be like shopping for an appliance on the Internet, where you just search for whoever has it for the absolute cheapest price and buy. I frankly do not see how your breeder can afford to sell kittens for $700 if she is spending several hundred on air fare to deliver each one. So after air fare and other travel costs she made only maybe $400 on the kitten, and it had to have two vet visits and shots, and the mom had probably some vet visits during pregnancy, and the mom had an echo done this year ($200-300 minimum), and food for the kitten for 3 mos and food for the mom, and of course she has had to pay for the inevitable large vet bills for some medical problem with her breeding cats, etc. You got quite a deal, I would say! I know that our main breeder, who charges $800 for her kittens, is losing money on the kittens. Heck, she paid for an echo for one of our MCs when a vet misdiagnosed it as having HCM because she was worried about continuing to breed the mom. She paid for a necropsy to be done on another one of the cats she had bred that had died suddenly at a young age to again rule out HCM. I can pretty much guarantee that people selling kittens for $500 are not taking steps like this to ensure the health of their breeding lines.