The 1990s were our pioneering years. Driven by conviction, youthful enthusiasm, and a desire to help cats, we planted a seed in the right place at the right time. That seed grew into something far beyond our wildest expectations—and so did our feline family, which had grown to 19 cats by the end of 1998.

Our first six cats—Freya, Cheops (Lucky), Olav, Nisse (Mischief), Mona, and Katja—joined us as Kitsilano strays and SPCA adoptees while we were living in Vancouver’s West End, close to the University of British Columbia, where co-founder Scott was completing his degree.

Our home on West 1st Avenue was only a short walk from the beach, often enjoyed with the cats on harness and leash. The switch to homemade cat food happened early, inspired by Freya’s recurring urinary tract infections. Freya was remarkably willing to sample my homemade creations, including cooked mice. Fortunately, all of our early cats were equally tolerant of my many culinary experiments and rarely turned down what was placed in front of them.

After Scott completed his bachelor’s degree, we moved east to Burnaby to accommodate both our growing feline family and our increasing commitment to helping cats. It did not take long before we became familiar with the cats of our new neighbourhood and recognised one outdoor family as particularly vulnerable. Burnaby was part of the nightly hunting territory of urban coyotes, and the risks to free-roaming cats were considerable. We welcomed a mother cat and her three adolescent kittens into our home, adding Bast, Nisha, Chetak, and Juniper—all black cats—to the family.

Although all study cats were ultimately spayed and neutered, we allowed young Katja and Chetak to have two litters of kittens so that our observations could extend beyond adult cats to include feline gestation, lactation, and kitten growth. These eight kittens became the first “Feline Future Kittens”—cats that grew on our food from the day of conception and spent their entire lives as members of our study group.

Shortly before our move to Salt Spring Island, we rescued two more cats from our Burnaby neighbourhood: a young male, belonging to a neighbour, who was the sole survivor of his family following a coyote attack, and the battle-scarred, unneutered fourteen-year-old father of Nisha, Chetak, and Juniper.