The show procedures vary widely, and awards won in one registry are not normally recognized by another.
ACA today accepts Canadian and Mexican as well as US registrations but remains primarily active in the northeastern United States.
The internationally broadest organisation is the Fédération Internationale Féline (FIFe, founded 1949 in Paris, and presently based in Belgium), which is a worldwide federation of member cat registries, with a large European and South American presence.
[2] The World Cat Federation (WCF, founded 1988 in Rio de Janeiro, presently based in Germany),[3] has a strong presence in Latin America, throughout Western Europe, and in countries of the former USSR.
It is organized on a similar basis to FIFe but has a much more permissive approach to new breed acceptance.
Going further, the World Cat Federation, a WCC member accepts half again as many breeds as it publishes standards for, because it accepting the standards of TICA, FIFe, and several other WCC-affiliated federations, though it has also produced some nomenclatural conflicts with some of them.
The actual designations differ between registries, but typically these are: Not all breeds achieve full (championship) status.
These may sometimes be used to maintain a good gene pool, but not exhibited in championship classes for the parents' breed.
It may also expel breeders who do not conform to accepted standards of behavior and ethics, with the result that their cats may be disqualified from its shows.
CFA takes a similar resistant approach, and has a position statement discouraging most attempts at new breed formation or even new coat colour patterns.
This may be followed by numbers or lower case acronyms that indicate colour and pattern, these being subdivisions of the breed.
Where a breed is already recognised by another registry, it is becoming increasingly common to adopt an existing acronym (with the possible addition or subtraction of a letter) in order to avoid clashes and confusion.
Where colours have been added to a breed through outcrossing to another breed, not all registries accept the new colours under the original breed name e.g. Chocolate Persians and Lilac Persians may be recognised under the name "Kashmir" as the two colors were introduced through crossing to Siamese cats during the development of the Colourpoint Persian (UK) and Himalayan (USA).