Our Cattery

Founded by The Helms Family in 2020
Rocketmans Maine Coons is a small home cattery, located in Lakeview Michigan

Our story is a semi tragic one. We wanted to add a Maine Coon to our family as a pet. Like many pet parents, we didn't know much about buying a registered purebred Maine Coon. We had previously purchased purebred bengals through a few others breeders and had no issues. We started searching the internet and came across a site named Hoobly. We found an adorable black kitten. We went to Ohio 8 hours away and picked him up. We named him Rocket. Rocket was our everything. He went everywhere with us. We had him for a fews months. One day we noticed that he was crying out when he was trying to urinate in the litter box. We knew this was urgent and rushed him to the emergency vets. We waited anxiously for the news.... Unfortunately Rocket was born with a urethra that was too small. No matter how hard they tried, they could not fix our little man. We had to make the painful decision to have him euthanized. We were extremely torn up over the loss of our Rocket. We contacted the breeder we got him from and was promised another kitten. We never heard from her again. After some investigation, we discovered that she was not a registered breeder and that our little Rocket was likely the result of backyard breeding. Backyard breeders are breeders that breed kittens mainly for money. They do not have registered cats, they don't health test their cats, and usually do not provide health care to them either. Backyard breeder kittens are usually genetically flawed and not healthy. We had learned a hard lesson and began to research about finding an ethical breeder. We had found another kitten from a registered cattery. Another black male kitten. We brought him home and he had a seizure 3 days later and passed immediately. We were absolutely distraught. The breeder was understanding and refunded us our money. We were not sure we were going to get another kitten at that point after what we had been through. We weren't sure why the second kitten had a seizure so we moved all of our other cats to our secondary house. We wanted to properly sanitize our cat room and house just incase it was something contagious. Soon after we moved our cats to our secondary house, our main house caught on fire and it was a total loss. A cheap power strip caught on fire in the middle of the night while no one was home. We had lost everything except for our pets who were luckily now at our other house. This all happened in the middle of covid. We moved into our travel trailer and began to remodel the secondary home to make it livable. Rebuilding was not an option at that point with wood prices and all the restrictions. After a few months, we found another breeder and picked up a little black smoke female kitten. We named her Stormi. We had purchased Stormi as a pet. While we were at the breeders house we asked if she would be willing to give us breeding rights. We weren't sure if we wanted to get into breeding yet but she agreed. At this point we were still very undecided what we were doing. We were just happy to have another kitten that was healthy. We did a lot of researched and we were nearly done with our remodel. We decided we would like to get into breeding. We wanted to produce healthy kittens so that hopefully no one would have to go through the pain that we went through. We got one more black smoke female, who we named Wreign, from the same breeder as Stormi. We then found our male stud, Yeti, and had him imported over from Russia. Breeding has brought to our family extreme happiness and extreme sorrow. It is far from just getting to cuddle with cute kittens all day. If you breed ethically, it is not going to make you rich. We like to think everything happens for a reason and Rocket and the other little kitten saved our family and pets from that fire. If those events wouldn't of happened, we might not be here today. It was very easy picking our cattery name, Rocketmans, named after our little Rocket, who we sometimes called Rocketman. We also designed our logo from his silhouette from a picture that we took before he passed. Thank you for reading our story and we hope one day you'll become a part of the Rocketmans family.