Chocolatedot Tonkinese
Current Breeding Queens
As hobby breeders, we are not a big cattery. We dont show, and we keep our cat household small so that we can make sure we have enough time and money to care for every cat 100% for the rest of their lives. We have made hard choices along the way to ensure that our cats and kittens get the very best care and attention, parting with cats who have not been happy here, or have been better suited as cats in single cat households. Our girls are very much a member of the family, we do not cage our cats, although they have a room where their litter trays are kept, the doors are kept open and tied back so the cats can wander and have free rein of almost every room in the house.
Our girls are not breeding machines, each girl has just about a year in between births so that they can have enough time to recover and gain back any health and condition they might have lost whilst nursing. This time frame is obviously looked at in an individual circumstance and where litters have arrived in a shorter time frame, it is because the girl would have been loosing too much condition by being a constant caller. so a earlier litter is the lesser of the 2 evils. The GCCF recommend births be no less then 17 weeks apart from each other. We wait much longer!
I have never been one to keep a queen as a breeder in to old age, I truly believe that after a few litters, she deserves the chance to be a "normal" cat, a much loved pet who doesn't have to worry about calling and babies. Not only do I feel this is better for the mum, but also better to progress the breed down the line. Usually I take no more then 3 litters from a girl before neutering and retiring her. Occasionally rehoming her if I feel she will benefit more from a pet home where she can have one on one love.
Mollie, Tonkaway Kianga
Mollie came to us in November 2020. We were really lucky to be able to have a breeding girl come up so quickly as the waiting list for Tonks in the UK is very long. Finally after so so many years of waiting for a Chocolate girl, Im very happy that she is Chocolate mink and could possibly carry dilute so mated to the right stud could have a variety of different colours.
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Mollie went to stud during October and was very sneakily silent, the stud owner wasn't sure if she had been knocked out of call by the blood tests and travel up but 3 weeks to the day after her arrival she pinked up so we were both very surprised as we hadn't thought she was even calling! Kittens were due from the 18th December.
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Mollie has had her litter, she started at 21.40 on the 23rd of December, it was a very slow labour and delivered on our bedroom floor on plenty of towels next to the radiator! she delivered 6 kittens but retained some of the placentas, this led to a later problem, an open Pyometra which is an infection inside but very lucky, but rather grossly the pus was coming out. This is much easier to diagnose and treat, as soon as I could see what was going on I knew it was a trip to our amazing vet Southmoor vets in Plymouth. (out of hours over Christmas of course!)
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Sadly we did loose one of the babies, she never thrived at all and despite us trying to hand feed, if they don't have the suck reflex they just are not able to swallow anything we try to feed them with. the remaining 5 kittens are doing very well, at 8 days old they all have their eyes open and some look like they are able to hear now and turn their heads when we speak to them. We have a mixture of girls and boys, and colours.... to be advised.. Tonks are very hard to colour correctly in their first 6 weeks at this stage we have 2 "light", possibly lilac 2 "darker" possible chocolate and 1 with a nose colour already which looks blueish. sorry I cant be more precise right now!