Fair Trade

[Petronilla Whitfield]

I suspect that any set of guidelines established by the secondary market rather than by KittyCatS will be more harmful to the community than otherwise.

I very much value the community here. Saga’s work in collecting and publishing trait information and the generosity of all those who share information has set a very high bar in the area of mutual cooperation and respect.

Let’s consider the issue of respect a little further. So far no one has argued against the notion that those who breed lines from starters deserve respect for their work and for the knowledge of kittycats that they have applied to that work. Everyone seems to be in agreement there. So far, so good. What about the work and knowledge of those people who resell cats?

If someone sells a cat she has bred and someone buys it, takes it to a widely attended auction, advertises it, and sells it for a better price, hasn’t that buyer also done work? Hasn’t that person put in time and effort to acquire knowledge of how the KittyCatS marketplace works, and applied their knowledge ? Haven’t they done a service in helping the traits in that cat be acquired by a breeder who might do something useful with them, when the cat and its traits might otherwise have sat, unused, in a shop?

Some have said that the better course of action would have been for the potential buyer to educate the breeder about how to sell the kitty for a higher price. Suppose, though, that the breeder finds marketing boring? That she doesn’t want to be bothered to put in the time and energy needed to market a cat properly? Perhaps she would rather expend less effort in learning about the marketplace and in advertising, and is happy with a lower price, one proportional to the modest effort expended in marketing, and is perfectly happy to have a middle-man resell her cats?

I am one of the people who finds marketing tedious. If someone buys a cat from me and resells it at a higher price, good for them, I say.

It seems to me that the issue of guidelines is not about respect for breeders—which seems to be well-established already—but about *disrespect* for resellers, and for those who are interested in both breeding and marketing. In all fairness, I think that *all* types of knowledge and effort in the secondary market place deserve respect: breeding, auctioning, figuring out trait placement, teaching, marketing, selling, and reselling. Attempting to promote the valuation of some types of knowledge and effort as virtuous while encouraging people to consider other types of knowledge and effort as shady and dishonest seems to me to be among the most divisive things that could be done to a community.