As soon as the first residents of the cat boat started moving in, people started offering their help to care for the cats. However, the original barge Henriette bought was “bursting at the seams after just three years.” So she bought a second one in 1971 and, by this time, people had started visiting the cat boat, too. Not just to drop them off, but to take them to their homes, too. “Nobody back in 1966 could have dreamed that one mother cat and her kittens would begin what was now the world’s most famous cat sanctuary,” the official De Poezenboot website reads.