Are Burmese/Bombay cats hypoallergenic?

Short answer: yes.

Slightly longer answer: Hypoallergenic simply means LESS allergenic. No cat is 100% free of allergens, but the Burmese and Bombay breed sheds less than most cats, has a single layered coat, and produces less of the Fel d1 protein that most people are allergic to. This combination means there is a good chance you won’t experience any allergies, or at least that you will experience less allergies than you would for most cats. After about 2 weeks, your body gets used to any cat you are around all the time, and allergens can be controlled further by consistently vacuuming, dusting, having an air purifier, and changing the sheets and pillow cases frequently. I am personally allergic to cats and I notice a huge difference between stuffing my face in one of my Burmese/Bombay cats and even just petting a cat of a different breed, but I would still recommend visiting a friend with a Burmese/Bombay cat or coming to visit the cattery in person if you think you might have allergies.

A lot of breeders house their studs in cages, do you do this?

We do not house our own studs, and this is because we simply cannot bear to have a cat alone in a room for the first several years of their life before they are retired. Studs cannot have access to the queens in the house, and they are also known to spray since they haven’t been fixed yet. Lucky for us, we found a gentleman, Dujin, who is happy to house one of our studs, Papa, simply because he loves that cat so much. Dujin gets a free cat, and we get to bring girls over whenever they are ready to be bred, and they do their thing for a few days before we bring them back home. Papa is full of love and gets to sleep with Dujin every night. He has the run of the apartment, and he doesn’t spray because there aren’t females or other cats there that he lives with, just Mack the dog. Some other studs we have used and will use in the future are housed with other breeders that we know and trust - one lives in the office of a breeder who works from home, and he seems to have a pretty nice life.

How do I know you aren’t a scam?

You can look for or ask for references - either other breeders that work with us or happy families who have received their cat in the past few months. We offer in-person visits, video calls, and phone calls to make sure you are comfortable and also to get a feel for you. We don’t give every person who contacts us a cat - we want to know that you will make a good pet parent to one of our little ones. We are registered with TICA and CFA, we go to shows and have a relatively active social media, and our kittens aren’t all 10 weeks old and perfectly in line with what you want - maybe one got an eye infection when they were little or another has trouble with biting feet, another might have all sorts of white hairs on their chest or armpits, and the last one is at their shy stage right now unless they are playing. Not everything is picture-perfect, and that is okay. We do take deposits, but only once you have claimed your kitten at 8 weeks - not before. This is because we never want to have to give a deposit back on a kitten that didn’t make it past the first couple weeks of life - but we have found that if we don’t take deposits, people will change their mind after getting us to hold the kitten extra long for them, and then we end up with an older kitten with no home, which is always hard.

What I will say is that a lot of the older breeders don’t always go to shows, don’t let people come to their houses, don’t understand video calls, and might have a rough looking website. This does not mean they aren’t a good breeder, it simply means they have more trouble with technology. Give these breeders a chance - ask for references or for a phone call, but don’t give anyone the full or even half price of a kitten without speaking to them enough that you trust that they are real and that the kitten they are selling you is real. Photos and videos don’t always count, they could be taken from the internet from some other breeder. If at all possible, get a video call with the actual kitten in it, or at least a reference from another breeder or pet parent and a phone call.

How do you make sure all your cats are socialized?

Breeding is a lot of work! Not just on the raising kittens front, but everywhere else from maintaining a website to responding to folks via email/text/phone, navigating the registrations of the cats, making connections with other breeders locally and internationally, and carefully pairing healthy cats together, watching out for recessive things in specific lines and making sure that the breed can go on into the future by outcrossing responsibly and avoiding inbreeding. If we only had 3 or 4 queens, we could do this all from one home, but a lot of folks have approached us about wanting to raise kittens but not wanting to do all the other complicated stuff. Therefore, we have what are often called “guardian homes” where folks raise kittens out of one or two mamas for us, and we cover their food/litter/medical/other costs. They don’t have to pay for the queen and they get paid monthly to help us out, and then they get to keep their girl after a few litters if they decide to be done breeding. This is a lot of work to set up, but it is worth it to watch the joy of raising kittens being spread around, and being able to teach these guardians about everything unexpected as it comes up on how to properly raise these kittens. We trust these other homes with our kitties and they raise beautiful babies which can help to come a little closer to meeting the insane demand for this breed. Nobody can possibly love 5+ queens worth of kittens at once, so we decided to take the harder route to ensure that our babies each get to experience the excitement from their guardians of raising a kitten or five, rather than the annoyance (and health risk!) of a swarm of 30 crazy kittens.