Only one cat I had growing up wasn’t a rescue. The other we got at the SPCA. Our family dog, we got at a farm in Michigan (we lived there) he wasn’t a breeder, but his dogs had puppies, and he just wanted to get rid of them, so we got the male beagle.
The two cats we have now were technically strays.
I found an ad on Craigslist for a cat, I believe they sent me pictures and I knew we had to get him. The lady who found him was an obsessed cat lady, her apartment was filled with cats that she takes care of (most of them were usually outside she said) big murals of cats on the wall..it was a trip. She found the cat abandoned, he was very very young, most likely not even 4 weeks old. We didn’t know a lot about the care of a newborn cat so we had to do research quickly. He had a lot of worm problems at first, it took months to get rid of them, but we finally rid of them completely.
Our other cat, Henry, was an outdoor cat in West Virginia, a girl my husband worked with called my husband and said we just had to have one of the cats because they needed homes. So my husband said yes, and she brought us our Henry.
If we ever get any more animals, cats will definitely be from a kill shelter and possibly a shelter dog…depends on how old our children are though.