Are These Cat Breeder's Conditions Enforceable in Ontario?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My wife and I are cat sitting for friends, and we are enjoying this cat’s company. He seems to be enjoying us too.

So I started looking online for cats that don’t shed. I started looking for breeders for a certain cat that I liked, and I got this contract emailed back to me. The conditions seem preposterous to me.

I’m no farmer, but when a company like Monsanto says you can’t keep seed at the end of the season to plant the following year, I would want to tell them to drop dead. But thankfully, I’m not a farmer.

And so it is with cats (or dogs). As I suspect it is with all breeders, they don’t want competition. So they demand that you agree not to breed, and that you will spay/neuter the pet when old enough to do so. I say it’s none of their business what I do with my pet. I live in Ontario, Canada, and I’m wondering if these conditions are enforceable where I live.

These are the breeder’s conditions. I’ve listed only those I find absurd:

We, (your names), the new owners of this cat, commit on our
honour to :

  • Sterilize our cat at his/her sexual maturity
    (between 5 and 10 months) and to send a copy of
    the sterilization confirmation certificate to the
    breeder/seller indentified above ;.
  • Never breed my cat;
  • Notify the breeder/seller identified above if it
    becomes impossible for me to keep my cat;
  • Never sell or give away my cat without the
    approval of the breeder/seller ;
  • Never hand over my cat to universities, research
    institutes, hospitals or laboratories for resarch;

Breach of this contract will result in the requirement that the
cat be returned to the breeder/seller and will invalidate the
current contract

I’ve omitted conditions I find reasonable, since they don’t relate to my objections.

Obviously, if the breeder doesn’t know what I’m doing, it’s not a problem, but if they heard that I was selling kittens, I’m just wondering if these conditions could be enforced in Ontario. Could I not sign the contract just to get the cat, and then flaunt them, with no legal risk?

2

Since this involves legal advice, let’s move it to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

3

IANAL, but as a layman, it seems to me, in general, when you voluntarily sign a contract you are agreeing to the terms of the contract. You aren’t being coerced; the terms aren’t illegal; your rights aren’t being violated.

Signing it is entirely voluntary. If you don’t like the terms, don’t sign it. You won’t get a cat from that breeder, but that’s the choice you make.

4

Yep.

5

I think that unenforceable contracts are unenforceable because they require you to do something illegal or onerous, or because they contain a clause that is specifically forbidden by some law. I don’t believe that there’s any relief regarding contracts that are merely unfavourable or undesirable.

Don’t ignore the possibility of negotiating with them about this. Contracts are easy to change - before you sign them at least. :slight_smile:

6

Are you planning to breed the cat you get? If not, why do you care that the contract forbids you from doing something you weren’t going to do anyway? FWIW, I’ve bought a number of pets (rats) from breeders and they usually have a “no breeding” clause like this. It doesn’t bother me at all, because I have no intention of breeding my pets. On the other hand, if you do plan to breed your cat, you should look for another source, since it’s unethical at the least to sign a contract you have no intention of honoring.

7

The no-breeding clauses are one thing, but forbidding sale or gift without their permission seems a bit ridiculous. I see why they put it in, but that may not be enforceable (mumblemumble first-sale doctrine, but IANAL). Unless the contract says you’re just leasing or licensing the animal ? :sunglasses:

8

They do sound tough to enforce, but din’t this situation occur to one of the female celebrities a few years back? Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, etc.

Yeah, here it is:

Dennis

9

In effect, the contract appears to amount to a license agreement. Think of the cat’s genome as intellectual property akin to software, and the contract’s terms as various forms of copy protection.

I have no idea whether any of those terms are unenforceable in Ontario, however.

10

When my parents were breeding & selling registered horses, they had similar conditions in many sale contracts.

They were quite strict in what males they felt were ‘good enough’ to be kept in the bloodline, and all others were to be gelded. If a stallion was sold too young to be gelded, the sales contract had a requirement that they be gelded within a specific period of time, and documentation provided to us. The contract said something like: “horse X is sold not as a breeding stallion, but as a pleasure horse. Purchaser agrees not to use said horse for breeding, and to geld said horse before age 2.” It also included a specific penalty clause, in that it set a sizable additional amount to be paid to us if the horse was not gelded, since the sale price of a breeding stallion was 4 to 5 times that of a pleasure horse.

At least twice, this provision was upheld. Not in Court, but by the buyers being told by their attorney that it wasn’t worth fighting, because they had very little chance of overturning it in court. In addition, at the time of the sale, we had notified the breed registry that the horse had been gelded, so they could not register any offspring from this stallion. (This was prior to AI becoming common for horses.)

Our sales contract also had a provision about sale or donation of the horse – it wasn’t forbidden, but we had to be given first choice of buying/taking the horse back. (And that provision had to be in any sales contract they made with any future buyer.) This was so that we could be assured that the horse was never neglected or abandoned to starve. (Currently, many breed registries have volunteer groups that will locate (and buy) registered horses from slaughter lots, and then contact the original breeder of the horse, to see if they will take the horse back and care for it.)

This was used a few times. Two or three horses were returned to us years later, when the buyers fell on hard times and were no longer able to afford to feed the horse, or became too old to care for the horse.

We also had one time where my parents refused to sell a horse to a specific person, who had a bad reputation for abusing & starving his horses. He eventually sent a confederate to buy the horse from us, but delivered it to that guy’s farm. My parents found out about this within a couple of months, and they hooked up the horse trailer, drove a couple hours to his farm, and simply loaded the horse up and brought it back home. I believe they eventually had to refund the money the purchaser had paid, but they deducted hefty mileage and fees for recovering the horse.

We never had anything in our contract forbidding use in research labs, but that isn’t much of a problem for horses (too expensive to keep for research, compared to dogs or cats).

Coming from a family that has been breeders of registered horses, dogs, & cats over the years, none of these contract provisions seem that unusual to me. Some might be hard to enforce in practice, but legally they are fine.

11

Dude. Don’t buy a purebred from a breeder just because of cat hair, you own a vacuum. Don’t buy at all, there’s a reason this is being outlawed in many places. Adopt from a shelter.

12

I’ve heard of these contracts for breeding and declawing.

My question is how would the breeder enforce such a thing? Show up at your house and inspect the animal or demand DNA from kittens on the premises?

If that were to happen can’t you just say the cat died and you had it cremated? Or does the contract specify you mail the carcass back?

13

OP, I would think it as enforceable as any contract, although I know nothing about Ontario.

But, it is a really good sign of a reputable, conscientious breeder, to have such a contract. Such a breeder will be more likely to have healthy animals that won’t develop problems due to genetics, and this is a good thing for pet owners.

This is not the only good sign, but it’s one of them.

The rescue I got my puppy from had a similar contract, including the stipulation that I take the dog to obedience raining.

I had a friend who bred German shepherd dogs. She wouldn’t sell me one! Even though she liked me. Because I was not the right owner for her line of dogs. It was a working line, and I just wanted a pet. (She did say that if one of her puppies flunked the temperament tests she gave them periodically during their young lives, she might think about letting me take it. But that never happened.)

As to how they’d check, I’ve heard of breeders doing home visits. I’ve heard of breed rescues doing home visits. But I think those are pretty rare, i.e., maybe they would check once. I think that was in my contract too, that they could do a welfare check. They never did. ETA: That I knew of, maybe they did a stealth thing. I do know my dog’s vet sent a letter saying she didn’t agree with the neutering schedule, that she would perform the neuter when she felt it was appropriate for the dog’s health and well-being, and they agreed to that.

14

When my cats have passed away (typically euthanized by a vet when it became necessary), I’ve had them cremated. I always receive documentation, such as the bill from the vet, and a certificate from the crematorium. So if I was a breeder, and you told me that a cat that you bought from me died and was cremated, I’d ask to see the documentation.

As for the OP, I’m not a cat breeder, but I don’t see anything other than conditions of sale. Many sale contracts have conditions of some sort. Those stated in the OP do tend to extend forward through the life of the animal (“Never sell or give away my cat without the approval of the breeder/seller”), but they’re not unreasonable; and at any rate, it seems to me that you’re planning to buy a pet to keep for the rest of its life. So does that clause really matter?

15

Maybe yes, if it became widely known that you were breeding cats for sale. The original breeder could file a lawsuit against you and then get a subpoena from the court requiring you to open your home or hand over your animals for inspection. Would anyone actually do this? Maybe, if they’re sufficiently litigious and feel that their chance of recouping their alleged damages outweighed the cost and nuisance of a lawsuit. Would it actually work? I dunno; that’s why the OP is asking if the terms are actually enforceable in Ontario.

16

We always had such a clause in our contracts when we sold dogs. And yes, we’d sneak up and check on them too if we could. Good breeders love their animals and treat them like family. If one of them falls on hard times, we want to help. We consider every birth a lifetime commitment. It’s long past the time when all the puppies we bred would be gone, but I still scan the televised dog shows looking for their grandpuppies.

There may also be a very good reason they don’t want that pet breeding. Responsible breeders will often undertake to breed out bad traits from a line. If they are selling a dog or cat as a pet, it may be because they are a carrier of an undesirable trait (hip dysplasia, juvenile cataracts, digestive issues, etc.).

If you want to breed or re-home your pets then you need to work with the original breeders.

17

It’s absurd to me that you would find those conditions absurd. They don’t want to contribute to cat overpopulation by having you getting the cat fixed. They don’t want something bad happening to the cat by you changing your mind and dumping him at the pound or giving him away to someone who will give him away or abandon him.

But really, this:

18

So, it was raining cats and dogs? :smiley:

We raise not cats, but dogs, salukis to be exact. It’s a pretty rare breed and typically, all of the breeders in a region know each other. We certainly know all of the ones here in Arizona and by extension, most of the ones in neighboring states as well. Kennels are anxious to keep their reputations up so if it looks like a puppy will not make the grade as “show quality” it will have in the contract a no breeding clause and be sold at a lesser price. Also, though not commonly enforced by contract is the understanding that if the buyer’s circumstances change, the breeder will take the dog back. Finally as a last resort is the Saluki Tree of Life Alliance which does rescue work.

19

We have purebred cats (two Russian Blue sisters, and two Singapura boys who have passed away). All of our contracts were similar, and I had no problem signing them. Breeders who truly care about their cats want to make sure they’re going to good homes and that pet-quality cats aren’t bred. They also don’t want the kittens they raised to end up in the pound or in a substandard situation if something should happen that required the original owner to give them up.

Breeders aren’t all horrible people churning out kittens and puppies in their backyards. The ones I’ve met care deeply about the breeds and the individual animals, and want only the best for them. I know there are a lot of bad eggs out there, but not all of them.

Heck, even the rescue tabbies we adopted (whom we love dearly) had conditions in their adoption contracts. Not as stringent, but still there.

20

I once purchased a pet-quality Rhodesian Ridgeback from a show breeder. She seized it back from its original owners because she wasn’t happy with how they cared for the dog. According to her they were relieved to be rid of him. Since he was already neutered when I got him there wasn’t worry about that bit.

One day, about a year after I got him she showed up unannounced at my door. About 30 minutes after my in-laws arrived, at dinner time, while i was trying to cook and wrangling 2 toddlers. She must have been happy with how the dog was doing as I never heard from her again.