Hopeful health news

We heart this new feline cardiology drug: Good news for people with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy means good news for cats—and vice versa.

Website under construction

I'm going to be working on SoftKitty.ca so it may be down intermittently this week.

Winter's Coming

And it's been taking its own sweet time. I'm not going to complain. I've thoroughly enjoyed the long autumn. But it was time to give the site and blog a winter makeover. After all, I need to do something while waiting for spring kittens. Sheldon and Satine will make such lovely babies. But for now, all Sheldon is interested in is chilling in laps.

Totally cool cat tree

Now if I can just figure out how to build one of these my kitty's will be so pleased.

Jerry

Bailey needs love

This special boy is looking for someone to give him extra cuddles. He loves to be held and will melt in your arms. He was days away from going home to his new family when a change in circumstance forced them to make the difficult decision to not bring him home. 

 

Attitude issue

Since becoming a cat breeder I've opened myself up to people passing judgement.  There is a school of thought where breeders are a vile evil, pushing more kittens into a world that already has too many, for crass profit.   That may be true in worst case scenarios, but most breeders I've met do what they do for the love of animals, and more often spend money rather than make it.  I read an article today about the the same kind of  breeder shaming occurring to dog breeders and it inspired me to share my thoughts on this.

In a perfect world there are no cats homeless. People don't casually cast off inconvenient animals to become strays, leave their pets unspayed or unneutered to breed randomly, or let them outdoors loose to become lost or injured. I'm not naive. The world is still far from these goals. If people strive for them though, surely we will get there someday, right?  Then where does the next generation of pet cats (or dogs) come from?  If all the breeders have quit and fostered rescues, as I had one lady tell me we should do if we really loved cats, the last rescue kittens would grow up, grow old and be the last generation of domestic cats.  There are between 73 and 43 unique and special varieties of felines that would disappear without breeders to continue their lineages.
  I'm not saying all breeders are perfect, and there are kitten and puppy mills which are a nightmare and do deserve to be shut down.  But I think that carpet condemning all breeders is short sighted. I wouldn't want to give up moments like this.

Hope for feline allergy sufferers

I'm one of the lucky ones.  I only have had one, mild, location specific pollen allergy. But several very nice cat lovers have come over to visit and nearly exploded.  A breeder's home is trial by fire to test feline allergies. Unless the cattery and household are totally separate, there will be pet dander.

Having had one such visit recently I went looking into what can be done for allergies and found Catspire.  This is a product being studied globally, and offers the possibility of curing cat allergies in a course of  four shots. So, to all of the frustrated cat lovers out there,

Winter has flown by. We were lucky this year and with the milder temperatures our girls didn't take long about coming into heat. We've got our first litter of kittens, and are looking forward to two more mid February.

We've got two red and white fellows. The tabby and white and black and white might also be boys, but they are so small it's hard to tell yet. 

I just added some of this summers kitten pictures to our Pinterest board.

Follow Crystal's board RagaMuffins on Pinterest.

New Video

Here's a new video of the May 2015 kittens 

Latest pictures of our May kittens

Very short post

This has been a crazy, up-down week. But *spoiler* there are now kittens. I promise more news when I'm not slave to the whim of tiny hungry babies.

Three card Monty

As some folks out there know, Magic play us fast in loose this winter with a false pregnancy. "Where are the kittens? Under here? No! Ha, so sorry!" When we gave her that name it was for her sparkling personality, not her skill at illusions. But the vet has assured us Friday that the current kittens should be more like the rabbit and the hat trick. We just have to wait for them to pop out now.

A kitten picture of Magic, her little ones may look very similar. 

Changing over hosting

We're changing over our website host service. Things will likely be wonky for the next little bit at Softkitty.ca as I figure out and work on set up.

Magic moments

I really do think Magic might try to have her kittens right on my desk. Her new favorite place since we bred her to Diego has been between (or on) my keyboard and screen.

Live from the CNE

Aramis is showing today and tomorrow and has made it into the finals in his first ring already! Go mink kitty!  ( and please forgive my shaky ipad pic )

CNE cat show

This weekend Soft Kitty will be at the CCA-AFC show at the Canadian National Exposition.  It's our first time going to this show, we're a little nervous with the heat and crowds.  We think it would be a great time for our natural mink mctabby boy to show off how lovely he is.

Server down, server down!

 It seems that there's emergency matienence on the servers hosting our website, Softkitty.ca.
We're not gone, just being held hostage by the net-gremlins.  Inmotion hosting promises that it should be back soon. The best advice I can give is to keep calm, and sing "Soft Kitty" in the mean time.

Aramis plans to nap through the downtime.

Minnie

Our smalles Muffin Minnie has started on wet food. This is a moment to celebrate since we've been fighting to get weight on her since her birth.  Now she can eat all she wants and not have to wait for Momma or us to feed her.  Though, she has decided we put down wet food faster if she howls for it at our feet.

Big momma

This is our girl Fiona, ealier this week

And this is her now, after giving us another lovely litter of kittens. 

That's the first little guy to be born there nursing. 

More baby pictures to come.