IRCA

In 1971, Ann Baker believed she had finally found the perfect solution by creating the International Ragdoll Cat Association (IRCA) and introducing a franchise system for breeders. She hoped it would allow her to reap the financial rewards of her discovery and secure a comfortable retirement.

The IRCA was founded in 1971 but did not begin operating in earnest until 1973. In order to establish her own registry, Ann first had to convince the authorities that the Ragdoll was such a unique breed that it could not be bred according to the rules governing ordinary cat breeds. To support her case, she relied heavily on the experiments carried out on the unfortunate descendants of Mitts and Gueber. At that time, the IRCA was officially registered with the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

The name "Ragdoll" became a registered trademark with the United States Patent Office under registration No. 1,026,916 and with the California Patent Office under registration No. 53044. The franchise agreement itself was drafted in 1970 and revised in 1975.

The franchise agreement consisted of eight pages. Here are a few extracts:

1. The number of Ragdoll breeders shall be limited to one per state, each with a protected territory of (...) (approximately ...), regardless of state boundaries.

2. The total number of Ragdoll breeders shall be limited to twelve worldwide.

3. The price of a Ragdoll shall be:

• $150.00 — Masked/Bicolour pattern
• $175.00 — Himalayan/Colourpoint pattern
• $225.00 — Birman/Mitted pattern
• $275.00 — Show quality

4. No breeding pair may be sold for less than $500 ("ties up territory for others"). No cats shall be delivered until full payment has been received.

5. Within three months of the birth of each Ragdoll litter, the franchise holder must submit a litter report and pay a registration fee of $5.00 per kitten.

6. Franchise holders may join the IRCA upon payment of a $10 membership fee.

7. A breeding pair shall cost $1,000, while the franchise itself shall cost $1,500.

Ann Baker soon discovered, to her own expense, that being the franchisor had its drawbacks, and in 1976 she abandoned the system altogether because it had become prohibitively expensive.
Every legal action required the services of an attorney, every amendment generated additional registration fees and, according to Ann herself, she finally gave it up because she did not want to remain contractually bound to dishonest breeders who had already failed to honour their own agreements.

As she explained: "The franchise offers the buyer a degree of protection beyond anything you can imagine—but absolutely none for the franchisor." She also discovered that establishing a franchise in every state was extremely costly. Outside California, the only state where she eventually created one was Indiana, for Blanche Herman.

She then laid down an exceptionally strict breeding programme which, she believed, would preserve the Ragdoll exactly as she had created it. In 1978 she published a booklet entitled IRCA and the Ragdoll Documentary, containing what she regarded as the authentic history of the breed together with detailed instructions on how to maintain a line of "true" Ragdolls.

To be perfectly honest, her explanations are anything but easy to understand or follow. They wander through metaphysical reflections, bizarre examples such as the famous "one-armed woman on a desert island" theory, endless repetitions and repeated outbursts against the traitors who, in her eyes, had stolen her precious cats.

In essence, the breeding programme was as follows:
Each breeder received one breeding pair, with one cat descending from Fugianna and the other from Tiki.
The original male then had to be bred "in line", being successively mated to his daughters, granddaughters and subsequent female descendants for seven generations.
Only after the seventh generation could those females be bred to a new male descending directly from Josephine. Only then, according to Ann Baker, would they produce genuine Ragdolls.

En voiture Simone, the journey had only just begun, and it would last seven years!

Breeders were required to follow Ann Baker's breeding programme to the letter. Any deviation meant that their kittens could no longer be called "Ragdolls", for two reasons. First, Ann insisted that the moment a breeder departed from her programme, everything that made a pure Ragdoll was irrevocably lost. More persuasively still, whenever a franchise breeder chose a different breeding path, the IRCA simply stopped registering those cats as Ragdolls.

Because the name "Ragdoll" was a registered trademark, Ann Baker alone could decide who was allowed to use it and who was not. Breeders who strayed from her programme—the future "secessionists"—were therefore forced to market their kittens under another name.

It was at this point that the breeders who had trusted Ann Baker found themselves trapped in an impossible situation.

While the Daytons had patiently registered all eighteen of their Ragdolls, together with every subsequent generation, with the established cat registries, the unfortunate breeders who had embarked on Ann Baker's extraordinary IRCA adventure had, or so they believed, registered their kittens only with the IRCA and the NCFA, and continued to do so for seven generations.
Yet although Ann Baker had retrospectively registered her original foundation cats with the NCFA as an experimental breed, there was no trace whatsoever at the NCFA of the kittens born to IRCA breeders during the intervening years. Ann herself acknowledged this in the following extract from the IRCA Newsletter:

"Francis Kosierowski of the NCFA knows every cat in the programme, how the breeding programme is to be conducted and why neither the programme nor the breed standard may be altered. It is private property, and every Ragdoll had to be registered through her so that a complete record of every Ragdoll could be maintained. All contracts, agreements between buyers and sellers, and every other document stipulated that every Ragdoll had to be registered with the NCFA. Once this had been done, anyone wishing to exhibit a cat could then register it with any other association."

"Some breeders registered their cats with every registry except the NCFA because they possessed the original pedigree records instead of cats with no recorded ancestry."

"After several years, those breeders—and the people who had purchased cats from them—petitioned and pressured the NCFA to register their Ragdolls. That proved impossible because none of the intervening generations had ever been officially registered." Q.E.D.

With the exception of the Daytons and a handful of early breeders who had refused from the outset to accept such an arrangement, most of the pioneers found themselves caught in the trap. Disillusioned with breeding, many simply gave up and eventually sold their Ragdolls back to the Daytons.