More Cancellations .... what's going on breeders ??

[Ivy Norsk]

If I were an auctioneer I would be freaked out by the idea that I was going into an auction where I didn't know how many panels I was selling, and cats where I'd never seen the pedigree before. Once upon a time Liriel Garnet, who taught breeding at Kitty Kottage and used to keep the Saga charts, used to say that going to auctions was one of the best ways to learn how to read a pedigree. This was true in the way she ran auctions, because she would go through showns and hiddens meticulously. I would not say this today to a new breeder, because some auctioneers simply read the traits and do no analysis at all or do it minimally. I understand that different auctioneers have different styles and I'm okay with that. But I would also say that some auctioneers, who really do the pedigree work and go through it with the audience, are better for new breeders. If everybody in the audience is an oldbie or a middlebie, then fine, we probably don't need that, but I still think the auctioneer should know as much as can be reckoned about the cat on the panel.

I have never signed up for an auction if I didn't already have a cat in hand. I understand that for many people, they are signing up to sell cats, and they just put up the best cat they have at hand that they are willing to part with at the time. I'm not comfortable with this as a selling mechanism, personally, though I have done a version of it. Some people can pull it off, some can't, depends on the quality of their Catteries. It is part of why we see the same people at all the auctions.