Life With Cats
Real cats. Real care. Real life in Hawaiʻi.
Cats are part of our everyday life at Kahu Pōpoki.
Some share our home sanctuary. Others live in community colonies we regularly feed and monitor. Many of the cats we know have crossed our path through rescue, TNR, spay-neuter clinics, post-operative recovery, veterinary care, feeding routes, or simply years of showing up and becoming familiar faces.
Living with cats teaches us things that are difficult to understand from a distance. We get to know individual personalities, friendships, health changes, routines, newcomers, disappearances, and the many ways cats respond to the people and places around them.
This is lived reality—the everyday experience behind the research, policies, and population numbers discussed elsewhere at Kahu Pōpoki. Through these cats and their moʻolelo, we can better understand what mālama, kuleana, animal care, and community cat management actually look like on the ground.
Sometimes there is an important lesson. Sometimes there is simply a cat doing something wonderfully cat-like. Both belong here.
Meet the Sanctuary Cats
Every cat has their moʻolelo.
Our home sanctuary is filled with cats who arrived through many different circumstances.
Some were rescued. Some needed medical care or recovery. Some could no longer safely remain where they were living. Others simply needed someone willing to accept the kuleana of caring for them over the long term.
Here you can meet them, learn their personalities, follow their lives, and see the relationships that develop when people and cats share life together.
Their stories also give us opportunities to explore rescue, pet retention, health, aging, behavior, and lifelong care—but first, they are simply their stories.
[Meet the Sanctuary Cats]
Life in the Colonies
See community cat management as it actually happens.
We regularly feed and monitor community cat colonies in Hawaiʻi.
Over time, familiar cats become individuals we know. We notice when someone does not appear for dinner. We recognize a newcomer. We watch for injuries, illness, kittens, and changes in behavior. We know which cats have been sterilized and which still need help.
Regular feeding gives us an opportunity to observe and mālama the cats while also tracking how a population changes over time.
Come along on colony rounds and meet the cats who make up these communities.
[Explore Life in the Colonies]
TNR & Clinic Life
Follow the work behind population management.
Trap-Neuter-Return sounds simple when reduced to three words.
In real life, it involves observation, planning, trapping, transportation, veterinary teams, surgery, recovery, return, and continued monitoring.
High-quality, high-volume spay-neuter clinics make it possible to provide this care at a scale that can begin to change populations.
Here we take you along—from first identifying a cat who needs surgery to trapping night, clinic day, post-op recovery, return, and seeing that familiar ear-tipped face again later.
You can also come behind the scenes of the clinic and meet the people whose work makes all of this possible.
[TNR in Real Life]
[Inside the Spay-Neuter Clinic]
Watch Life With Cats
See it for yourself.
Video lets us share the small moments that words often miss.
- Morning at the sanctuary.
- Cats arriving for dinner at a colony.
- A newcomer appearing for the first time.
- The excitement of finally trapping a difficult cat.
- Post-op recovery.
- A return to familiar territory.
And plenty of cats sleeping in strange places, stealing one another's beds, demanding dinner, and reminding us that not everything needs to become a lesson.
These videos let you spend some time with the cats and see the work as it happens.
[Watch Life With Cats]
What We Learn Along the Way
The cats featured throughout Kahu Pōpoki help connect ʻike, research, and lived experience.
- A newcomer can help us understand abandonment and population movement.
- A TNR journey can make sterilization and population management visible.
- A sanctuary cat can help us understand lifelong care.
- A colony changing over several years can show us what sustained management actually looks like.
These individual experiences do not replace scientific evidence. They give that evidence context and help us recognize the questions worth asking.
That is one reason Life With Cats sits beside Learn With Cats and Talk Story With Cats.
We live the experience. We learn from it. And we share what we discover with one another.
[Learn With Cats]
[Talk Story With Cats]