ForestWind Siberian Cats

Rossity Sultan, photographed by Helmi Flick, after taking fourth and fiifth best cat against some very stiff competition, and a large Siberian Championship field, at Jersey State Feline Fanciers' Edison NJ Show  January 29 - 31, 2010. 

This three day show is large, and was well attended. It was a pleasure visiting with old friends and making new friends, and introducing many visiting cat lovers to Sultan, his son, ForestWind Feliks Sultanovich, and Feliks' half-brother, ForestWind Wyatt Sharikovich (Eleonora Silva Line x Cica Sharik Angel Zhandarmovich).

Feliks took both Best Kitten and Second-best long hair Kitten! You can see Feliks' strong resemblence to Daddy Sultan, in the photo below. T

We are looking forward to the March 5th & 6th Cats on the Beach Show in Providence, Rhode Island. Hope to meet you there!

Warmly,

Kate & Carolyn

We have several pages on our sited dedicated to helping you prepare for your kitten's home coming.

Getting Ready For Baby links you to ocations to buyt food, discusses litter box size and type of litter we use, in addition to discussing buying bedding for cosying up your Siberian kitten in.

We'd also like to draw your attention to our Toys and Supplies suggestions. Here we specifially show you the climbers, scratching towers, and some of the toys our ForestWind Siberian kittens and cats use.

We also invite you to join our Forum, where you will find more information on topics like Making Your Own Raw Food.

If there are other topics you'd find helpful to know about as you prepare to welcome your kitten home, please let us know! We'd be delighted to add more information to our website for you, as well as specifically respond to your emails

Warmly,

Kate and Carolyn

ForestWind Siberians has scheduled our Feburary Allergy Open House!!

We are sorry, but due to the number of requests for allergy appointments, we are only able to accept Allergy Open House appointments for folks with paid kitten reservations.

This Allergy Open House is not to meet kittens, or hold extended discusions. We have learned that in order to be most fair to the number of persons needing to allergy challenge, that we must focus on exposure to the cats. If you have lots of questions, we would love to address them. It is best to do this pre appointment, and before you make your kitten reservation.

Allergy Open House appointments made on the 1/2 hour, and run from Noon until five p.m. on Saturday February 7 and Sunday February 8th.

You will need to provide a car for testing in order to conduct your challenge in a space free of allergens you might react to in our home (higher FELD 1 cats, our lab puppy, dust, etc). You will have 1/2 hour with one of our male cats. If you require longer to react, we will schedule you to return later the same day. We are unable to accommodate multiplie day exposures.

We invite you to complete and submit your ForestWInd Siberians Allergy Open House Appointment Form.

We've just updated our Kitten Colors page with information about a useful article by TICA Judge Beth HIcks. Titled "What Colour Is My Cat?" it provides helpful descriptions of color an patterns on the cat. There are excellent photographs by well known Cat Photographer Helmi Flick to illustrate the patterns and colours being described. For example, here is a stunning photo taken by Helmi of a red ticked Maine Coon cat:

Enjoy!

Warmly

Kate and Carolyn

Excerpts from "A CAT'S GUIDE TO HUMAN BEINGS"

1. Introduction: Why Do We Need Humans?

So you've decided to get yourself a human being. In doing so, you've joined the millions of other cats who have acquired these strange and frustrating creatures. There will be any number of times, during the course of your association with humans, when you will wonder why you have bothered to grace them with your presence. What's so great about humans, anyway? Why not just hang around with other cats?

Our greatest philosophers have struggled with this question for centuries, but the answer is actually rather simple: THEY HAVE OPPOSABLE THUMBS. This makes them the perfect tools for such tasks as opening doors, getting the lids off of cat food cans, changing television stations and other activities that we, despite our other obvious advantages, find difficult to do ourselves. True, chimps, orangutans and lemurs also have opposable thumbs, but they are nowhere as easy to train.

2. How And When to Get Your Human's Attention.

Humans often erroneously assume that there are other, more important activities than taking care of your immediate needs, such as conducting business, spending time with their families or even sleeping. Though this is dreadfully inconvenient, you can make this work to your advantage by pestering your human at the moment it is the busiest. It is usually so flustered that it will do whatever you want it to do, just to get you out of its hair. Not coincidentally, human teenagers follow this same practice.

Here are some tried and true methods of getting your human to do what you want:

Sitting on paper: An oldie but a goodie. If a human has paper in front of it, chances are good it's something they assume is more important than you. They will often offer you a snack to lure you away. Establish your supremacy over this wood pulp product at every opportunity. This practice also works well with computer keyboards, remote controls, car keys and small children.

Waking your human at odd hours: A cat's "golden time" is between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning. If you paw at your human's sleeping face during this time, you have a better than even chance that it will get up and, in an incoherent haze, do exactly what you want. You may actually have to scratch deep sleepers to get their attention; remember to vary the scratch site to keep the human from getting suspicious.

3. Punishing Your Human Being

Sometimes, despite your best training efforts, your human will stubbornly resist bending to your whim. In these extreme circumstances, you may have to punish your human. Obvious punishments, such as scratching furniture or eating household plants, are likely to backfire: the unsophisticated humans are likely to misinterpret the activities and then try to discipline YOU. Instead, we offer these subtle but nonetheless effective alternatives:

* Use the cat box during an important formal dinner.

* Stare impassively at your human while it is attempting a romantic interlude.

* Stand over an important piece of electronic equipment and feign a hairball attack.

* After your human has watched a particularly disturbing horror film, stand by the hall closet and then slowly back away, hissing and yowling.

* While your human is sleeping, lie on its face.

4. Rewarding Your Human: Should Your Gift Still Be Alive?

The cat world is divided over the etiquette of presenting humans with the thoughtful gift of a recently disemboweled animal. Some believe that humans prefer these gifts already dead, while others maintain that humans enjoy a slowly expiring cricket or rodent just as much as we do, given their jumpy and playful movements in picking the creatures up after they've been presented.

After much consideration of the human psyche, we recommend the following: Cold blooded animals (large insects, frogs, lizards, garden snakes and the occasional earthworm) should be presented dead, while warm blooded animals (birds,rodents, your neighbor's Pomeranian) are better still living. When you see the expression on your human's face, you'll know it's worth it.

5. How Long Should You Keep Your Human?

You are only obligated to your human for one of your lives. The other eight are up to you. We recommend mixing and matching, though in the end, most humans (at least the ones that are worth living with) are pretty much the same. But what do you expect? They're humans, after all. Opposable thumbs will only take you so far.

There appears to be Yugisoft problems - please do not order from them. Their website is down, and we've been unable to establish contact.

Unfortunately we've received notice from a ktiten family they ordered climbers in December and never received them. We have also had contact from other breeders who have used them and their kitten families are not getting contact.

Should this change we will update. For now, we can no longer recommend them. If you have a Yugisoft order and paid via PayPal, contact Paypal to resolve. They will reach out to the business owner, and you should either get your product or Paypal refunds your money.

 "Feline Husbandry," authored and edited by Dr. Niels C. Pedersen of the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis, was originally published in 1991.

The book struck a chord with breeders of purebred cats, is a respected resource covering all aspects of managing feline health in catteries.The author's intent is that the book should be a highly useful tool to improve the way cats are managed by both new and experienced breeders of purebred cats.

Only 3800 copies of the book were printed, and it is now out of print. Copies of the book have become collector's items, difficult to find and expensive to purchase**. Demand for the book remains strong, and large parts of the text are both current andrelevant.

The Center for Companion Animal Health (CCAH) is pleased to provide a copy of the book in .pdf format on this web site as a resource for cat breeders who are unable to find a copy elsewhere.

** When Kate and Carolyn found a copy to purchase in 2005, it cost us over 100 USD (And, yes, we did purchase it).  Now you can have it for free, thanks to The Center for Companion Animal Health (CCAH).

Thank you for asking us how to adopt a ForestWind kitten when you are allergic to cats

We conduct a thorough review with you to assess the likelihood of your success in an kitten adoption. Here are the steps you will take:

1. Complete and submit an adoption application.

2. Request a fur sample.

3. Assess reactivity.

4. Select your Safe Home.

5. Research and begin to implement allergy house cleaning strategies in your home.

6. Reserve your kitten.

7. Decide whether to schedule an in-person challenge. 

It is up to you whether you then elect to schedule a visit to our home tocheck your reactions "up close and personal" with a real live Siberian cat (or two).  We are happy to make these arrangements for folks who have kitten reservations with us. Your reservation fee is refunded in full if there is clear evidence of an allergic reaction while you are at our home. Unfortunately, we cannot observe reactions after you leave, and regretfully cannot return any deposits at that point. Therefore, please ensure that you plan for enough time to allow your reaction to occur.This means thirty minutes of interaction with our cats + spending several hours, if necessary, in the local area before returning to our home to hold another cat and evaluate reactivity.You need to exhibit visible signs of allergic reaction in order to have your reservation refunded. While we are very supportive of allergy adoptions, we can not serve as a "testing station" for adoptions from other breeders.

8. Prepare to bring your kitten home.

9. Mail signed and notarized Contract.

Please send your comments, suggestions, complaints, notification of spelling errors and dead links, and any confusions about our website redesign to us at

SweetSiberians@aol.com

We are doing our best to coordinate the site to get "like things" together, and to relocate more of the indepth information to the forums, in order to make the website easier to navigate. Not being webdesigners, this is always a learning process for us! We invite you to join the forum to share information, ask questions, and learn more about Siberians and felines in general!

Gostimira's and Wyatt's kittens are going home We couldn't resist sharing a few photos from their last days with us. They have such great personalities and we love the way we find them curled up with their friends, or in the case of Premi - taking over the Lab's bed!!  We aer expecting Malania's kittens in February and will be opening the Reservations in the next few days. Reservations are already  full for Novia's litter.

This is Premislava on Emma's bed. You can't see her, but Emma is curled up on the floor next to the bed, lol!

One of Michael and Jason's boys playing peekaboo behind ForestWind Feliks.