Pedigree Fraud is a fact!

BREEDERS: BEWARE OF FALSIFIED PEDIGREES WHEN IMPORTING A CAT

Also important for Exhibitors and potential pedigree kitten owners

There are cats being found in Australasia and some parts of Europe with falsified pedigrees.

These pedigrees carry the logos of well-known and established Registering Bodies and initially look genuine. But, on closer inspection, have been found to have incorrectly formatted Registration Numbers or misspelled prefixes or even legitimate Catteries with unknown offspring as confirmed by the Breeders.

It is believed by at least one person that this originates from China and/or Russia and could have something to do with Pet Agents/Shops receiving undocumented kittens and somehow managing to access the online registrations of certain organisations to generate the false pedigrees.

Unfortunately, it appears that the falsification of pedigrees involves more than one or two breeds- pedigree auditors have found falsified documents relating to British, Ragdoll, Sphynx, Scottish and Maine Coons.

Images are by courtesy of Royal Canin and Unsplash.

This is most alarming for us in South Africa where we have backyard and/or non-ethical breeders- please don’t jump and down and become indignant about these words!

We often hear “it’s so expensive to register” or “the new owner doesn’t really want a pedigree” and even “I only register the show cats because most people don’t care whether the cat is registered or not as long as it has a pedigree”.

One must ask how long before the SA backyard/non-ethical breeders produce, what appears to be, a legitimate pedigree from a well-known registering body which a couple of generations down the line ends up in your lines thereby “bastardising” the genuine purebred cat you are trying to breed to achieve perfection!

The onus is on you to investigate the pedigree before you import a cat from an unknown Breeder – an ethical breeder should not have an issue with this. Likewise, our Registrar will be thoroughly investigating all imported cat pedigrees (even those that come via another SA Registering Body)- and if he finds an issue, your very expensive imported cat may end up not being registered in SACC.