Finding the right Bengal kitten can be really hard, because the breed is so new. Bengals differ quite a lot yet in bodytype, pattern, coat quality, ancestry and confirmation. The most important thing to do before buying a kitten is to know what you want from your future Bengal. If you want a beautiful pet, buy the kitten you like best and find most beautiful yourself. A male, once neutered, is often more involved with his humans and more impressive in appearance than a female. Also, males are often easier to come by and cheaper. But of course this is not a rule set in stone, and a lot of pet owners are very happy with their spayed female Bengals.
If you want a Bengal to breed with, you probably already have a clearly defined idea of what you want. A breeding animal can have some excellent qualities you specifically need to improve your breeding efforts. If you want to start breeding, the best thing to do is to buy as beautiful a female Bengal as you can afford, with as many as the traits you desire your future Bengals to have. Of course you might consider buying a less expensive, less beautiful female kitten with an excellent ancestry. That way, you can try whether you like breeding Bengals (e.g. you may not be able to part with the litters: this will fill your house with cats at an incredible rate) without having to spend lots of money on a queen and a studfee both. By finding the right stud you can breed that beautiful showquality kitten yourself, and it will even carry your own catteryname. If you then decide you like breeding Bengals, you can always buy yourself an additional female, or a male from a different line.
Bengals still show considerable differences in type and pattern from one breeder to the next, or even with one breeder. The number of generations a Bengal is removed from the wild can be a very important in this respect. Some Bengal breeders advertise with pictures of very wild looking F-1 and F-2 cats, while selling mainly later generations of Bengals. If the potential buyers visit and see those adorable fuzzy kittens, they might think that these cuties will grow up to look as wild as the cats from the advertisement. This is of course not the case. If you are planning to buy from a breeder who has foundation generation Bengals as well as later generations, the mother of the litter you are interested in will give you a good impression of how the kittens will look when they grow up. If she does not look as wild as you had expected from the pictures, her kittens will not either. Really wild looking F-1 and F-2 males are almost always sterile and are therefore usually neutered and sold as pets. If you want such a very wild looking early generation Bengal you must specifically ask for it, and you must consider very well before deciding to adopt one, for they are not usually easily kept.
F-1 and F-2 males can be very good pets if they have been socialized very well and are neutered at an early age. F-1 females are usually very expensive, and they can start spraying when they become sexually mature. They can also have an unstable temperament, especially when they have kittens, and they need a quiet place for themselves, where they are not disturbed. F-2 females can be kept in the livingroom if they have been socialized well at an early age, and they can also quite easily have kittens. Breeding F-1 females is a job for experts, because they can be very easily disturbed and may then eat their young, or defend them aggressively. The kittens must be socialised from a very early age, and sometimes they must be taken away from the mother and be hand reared, to prevent them from becoming wild. This is a very heavy responsibility for the breeder, for if the resulting F-2 kittens are not handleable he cannot sell them. If the breeder does so anyway, these F-2 Bengals can severely damage the reputation of the entire Bengal breed. For the difference between a second generation or a sixth generation Bengal may be clear to us, it will not to everyone, and the reputation of the Pitbull of the catfancy is very easily earned.
The best way to buy a Bengal kitten is to visit as many breeders as possible, to see what kind of Bengals could be the parents of your future kitten. The parents usually give a very good impression of what their offspring might look like. The breeder will certainly have his own expectations of the future litters, and he can describe them to you. If the parents closely resemble one another, predicting what the kittens will look like will generally be quite easy. Unpleasant, but also exiting surprises will occur more often in litters from parents who do not resemble each other closely. If the cats are proven breeders, much will already be know about the way they inherit, especially if the combination is a repeat breeding. Usually, you will choose a breeder you find trustworthy and whose Bengals you like, and reserve a kitten with a certain appearance or from a certain combination. When the litter is born, you can choose the kitten you want.
If a litter is born already, you can choose a kitten immediately. We expect, that in the nearby future the waiting times for kittens will decrease substantially, for a pet Bengal to about twelve weeks, the time a kitten should stay with its mother once it is born. You can use the following tips to pick out a good Bengal kitten from a very young litter:
* visit the kittens before they are three weeks old: the pattern is now at its best for a long time.
* stripes can break into spots, but those spots will keep a vertical orientation.
* pink bellies indicate a pelt coat, goldglitter is visible on the bridge of the nose. Also look at the parents for these traits.
* highly rufous kittens with brown spots are very likely to lose contrast towards adulthood.
* behind the ears and on the paws the future colour can be estimated, even if the rest of the body is a clear grey colour.
* the headtype cannot be seen very well until about 8 weeks, so visit the litter again at that age.
* at 8 weeks the kittens go into the fuzzies: the pattern fades temporarily.
* big, buggy eyes on a kitten will give beautiful eyes on an adult.
* the muzzle must be square with extended whiskers, it may be narrower with the whiskers pulled back.
* the ears are still relatively big, but rounding and broadness are visible already. Compare with littermates.
* watch out for white spotting, tail faults, coarse coat (6 weeks) and weak chin.
* the bodytype is very hard to estimate, look at the parents and compare with littermates.
Like all very social breeds of cats and dogs, Bengal kittens must have a lot of contact with people while they are still with their mother. If they do not have this, the kittens might learn to like other cats better than people. A Bengal that has been raised without people can be a very social cat for people if it is the only cat in the household, because a Bengal needs a lot of affection and companionship. If you have other cats, such a Bengal will almost completely devote itself to the other cats, and keep itself aloof from people. It is alway preferable, however, to buy a Bengal from a breeder who gives kittens sufficient attention from a very early age. The best choice is probably a breeder who lets the kittens roam the house freely, and who does not have too many litters at the same time, so that every kitten gets some of his time for itself.
When you are visiting a breeder to look at a litter, and the kittens are busy playing, they can protest if you want to pick them up. This does not mean that those kittens are insufficiently socialised. Bengals play very intensively and do not like to be disturbed. If you pick up a toy and start playing with them, you will immediately be accepted. Some Bengals may be distrustful of strangers, especially if they want to pick them up right after entering the house. A better way to make contact is to quietly sit down, the kittens then will come to you, for Bengals are very curious.
