The Story of Steamboat Cattery

The Story of Steamboat Cattery

Story of Steamboat Cattery

I grew up having Persians as pets my entire childhood. I just fell in love with the look, demeanor, and overall personality of the Persians. Fast forward to 2002. I bought my daughter and I each a Himalayan kitten as a pet. These two lasted well into old age. When the first of these two passed away, I told my husband that “Cocoa” needed a friend so he wouldn’t be by himself (even tho we had multiple kids at home, lol). He found out how expensive they were, and jokingly quipped, “Well, I think we should just get two!” Well, that was the wrong thing to say. 😂 I talked to him about the possibility of breeding. Since Himalayans were all I had ever had as pets, we decided to research breeding and the most successful catteries, desirable traits, etc. I found that many of the same principles applied to cats as what I had applied when having running bred Quarter Horses also my entire life. To make a long story short, after many many hours of research, we were fortunate to buy one male and two females from catteries such as Carissa Altschul’s Cacao and Jody Greenwood’s Raggamops here in Texas and Steamboat Cattery was born. We are thankful to them for taking a chance on us as brand new breeders! 

A little less than two years later, we had been blessed with a few litters and I contacted Carissa about possibly another breeding cat. She told me about another type of breeding program they were involved in...odd and blue eyed (OE/BE) bicolors. Once again, I spent hours and hours and hours researching the bicolor OE/BE phenomenon. We decided to purchase a girl from Carissa from her Purrinlot line and eventually got our odd eyed boy with her referral. We then proceeded to contact select breeders and purchased additional breeding cats in hopes of producing odd and blue eyed cats that were as nice as copper eyed bicolors. As all breeders know, this is always an ongoing process and we are always striving for better and better type. During this time, we decided to focus solely on the OE/BE bicolors. 

There are too many individual breeders to name who were so gracious to sell us “newbies” their nice cats, but you can clearly see from the cats on our website who all has been instrumental in us getting started. We are so thankful to each and every one. 😊 

Since a breeding program is all about evaluating and re-evaluating your goals, in 2018, our 2nd year, we have tweaked our goals a little bit and decided to bring a smaller, more precise focus to our OE/BE program by having the goal of using only pure Persian breeding cats in our main OE/BE program with pure Persian pedigrees back at least 12 generations. We realize this is quite a bit more rigid than what CFA requires in the Persian registry, but this is just a personal thing that we would like to strive for, and research pedigrees to the best of our ability. (We absolutely love Exotics and CPC’s and think they are wonderful...we are just choosing not to breed with CPC’s and Exotics in the OE/BE pedigrees, adding yet another challenge to our breeding program besides producing OE/BE.) ❤️ Also in 2018, we jumped off into the world of showing just a tad. We have enjoyed the experience so far, and are thankful for the persistence that Carissa and Tracy Bayarena showed in encouraging us to get our cats into the show hall. We are also thankful to Tracy for showing one of our 2018 odd eyed girls this year (GC RW Steamboat Pistol Annie) in the kitten classes and then as an adult until she achieved her Grand Championship and ultimately a Regional Win in the kitten classes. 

We have met so many wonderful people in the cat fancy and we are thankful to all those who have helped us get started. We get questions from people often about how we got started, why we chose odd eyes, etc and so I thought this would be a good time to explain. Steamboat Cattery thanks all mentors and clients who have supported us and our cats. 💕🌹💕