Governing Council of the Cat Fancy
The Governing Council of the Cat Fancy (GCCF) is one of the oldest European umbrella organizations of cat associations, which deals with the exhibition and the breeding and keeping of cats.
history
Founded in 1910 by three or four independent clubs in the UK , the initiative came from the National Cat Club. The cat associations active at the beginning of the 20th century had different systems of registering pedigree cats and exhibitions, some of which they did not recognize each other (which is still common practice on the mainland today). The National Cat Club realized that this would lead to wild growth that would be detrimental to cat breeding. The GCCF was founded to introduce uniform exhibition, breeding and husbandry guidelines and to keep a uniform registration of breeding cats in a stud book .
The inclusion of a cat in the stud book was tied to two conditions: Their ancestors had to be registered up to the great-grandparents and all ancestors had to be of the same breed. At that time there were a total of four "races" (more precisely: sections in the stud book): long-haired cats , short-haired cats , Abyssinians and Siamese . Today there are many more (as of 2006: 55), which is partly due to the fact that the GCCF recognizes 12 different "races" among the Persians alone .
The stud books kept by the various associations at that time were merged so that a breeding register dating back to 1910 could exist if these records had not been lost. The oldest existing stud books date from 1925. However, there are exhibition catalogs up to 1910, from which the names of the animals and their parents are also known, so that you can possibly carry out a successful family tree research back to this year - if you have animals from these breeding lines.
Current
Today 143 clubs are affiliated to the GCCF. They are increasingly concerned with the welfare of the cat itself, be it with or without a pedigree. Of course, they also organize exhibitions, but since the GCCF only licensed around 120 exhibitions between June 2005 and May 2006, not all of these associations can deal with the exhibition system.
As an umbrella organization, the GCCF is limited to the United Kingdom, so its effect should actually be limited to that. But since he set established and recognized breed standards across Europe at a very early stage, his influence is also widely felt on the mainland: The so-called "free" cat clubs (which do not belong to any umbrella organization) often rely on the breed standards of the GCCF.
The main task of the association today is to issue pedigrees, license exhibitions, train judges and, as an umbrella organization, hold the cat clubs together. The GCCF itself mainly supports the welfare of cats through a foundation established in 1988, the Cat Welfare Trust. This supports research projects related to cats. In addition, the GCCF conducts training courses for breeders of cats to keep their breeding animals healthy.