About Us
Cagaran is a GCCF-registered prefix, owned by Matt Buck and Heather McRae. We live in a village just outside Falkirk, basically in the centre of the triangle made by Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Stirling. The first Cagarans were born back in 2010, and we breed all varieties of Asian/Burmilla cats, with a particular focus on Tiffanies.
Heather
I grew up in Falkirk where my family pets were rabbits and guinea-pigs, though many of my wider family had dogs. I started the Cagaran prefix with my ex, Richard, whom I met in 2000, whilst studying Management at Lancaster Uni. We considered ourselves ‘dog people’ before our first cat, Tiger, moved into our student house without giving us any choice in the matter.
Until that point, I thought all cats were stuck-up and vindictive, like the two Siamese in Disney’s ‘Lady and the Tramp’, so although they came under my general fondness for animals, I had never wanted to own one. Tiger was very much my cat, however, and I was distraught when he had to be PTS due to cancer in 2005. He has his own page in the ‘Our Cats’ section, and ‘Our Story’ explains how one cat became two, then four, then seven, and eventually resulted in us having a ‘family’ stretching to hundreds of cats and owners.
Matt
Matt is originally from Bristol and was lucky enough to start sharing his life with cats 1994, when he was just eight. His family’s first cats, sisters Hazey and Bramble, were semi-feral rescues used to having outdoor access, and were unfortunately killed on the road. Brothers Smudge and Whisky fared better, with Smudge lasting until the grand age of 19.
By that point, Matt lived in London, having completed a Masters and PhD in Maths at Nottingham Uni, and then gone to work for Tubelines, who later became TfL (where he still works today). As is often the case for young professionals living in London, Matt moved around through a variety of rented houses in the Docklands area before eventually purchasing his own flat in 2019. Little did he know that he’d live in it for less than a year before everything changed with the covid epidemic of 2020.
Matt and I met in an online forum in 2020, at a low point in both our lives (and those of countless other people around the world). My relationship with Richard had broken down and I had people sharing my flat who made it a very uncomfortable place to be. Scotland was back in lockdown so I couldn’t meet up for walks with my friend in Dunbar, and I was the only one in my office not furloughed. I felt like I was going mad with my only human contact being my unpleasant ‘housemates’ but I worried that I was leaning too heavily on my closest friends, so I joined an online community looking for conversation. I started messaging with lots of like-minded people, of which one was Matt and, since he felt a similar sense of isolation, working from home, we started running a video call in the background while we worked. Hearing the noise of another person typing, shuffling, clearing their throat, grumbling at stupid emails, brought us a tiny sense of normality.
After weeks of such calls, and other messaging, we wanted to meet up but lockdown rules made that awkward. Since he was in London and I was in Scotland, the only viable way to comply with the lockdown rules was to ‘bubble’, so our first meeting meant living together for several days. That gave our blossoming relationship a rapid shove in the direction of serious but somehow it just worked. After 18 months of frustrating distanced relationship, I managed to get rid of my housemates and Matt moved in with me.
We had our first joint litters while Matt was still living between here and London, but he still managed to be here for all their major milestones. The mum of the first litter, Prickles, has loved Matt since he was just a voice on the end of the phone, and she bequeathed her first kitten to him, repeatedly plopping him on Matt’s chest in bed as if to say “this one’s yours”. He was the runt of the litter and even required hand-feeding for a while (which Matt did, expertly), but of course we gave in to her wishes and kept him. That was JL, who’s now a big, cuddly lump and the favourite of a lot of visitors to our home. He also feels, to me, like a symbol of a new chapter in my life, and in the story of the Cagaran prefix.
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Emily Davis