9Lives is the name of a brand of cat food, owned by Big Heart Pet Brands and introduced to the market in 1959. It is best known for its mascot, Morris. 9Lives has four varieties of dry food (Daily Essentials, Plus Care, Indoor Complete and Long Life Formula), and five lines of wet food in various flavors. The company also promotes adoption of cats from animal shelters. In 2006, 9Lives kicked off the inaugural tour of Morris' Million Cat Rescue, a nationwide bus tour to encourage local cat adoption.
The company has recently added a new cat to their advertising, Li'l Mo, an orange kitten who has been adopted from a Los Angeles animal shelter putatively by Morris himself.
For a period of time in the 1970s and 1980s, 9Lives used Sylvester the Cat from the Looney Tunes cartoon series in its advertising. These ads usually consisted of Sylvester trying to get to his box of 9Lives dry food while avoiding Hector the Bulldog. Sylvester would always succeed in luring the dog away so he could get to his food, but would always find himself a target again by the end of the commercial. Sylvester would always call 9Lives dry food "worth riskin' your life for." (Sylvester never appeared in commercials for 9Lives canned cat food and was eventually replaced by Morris for dry food commercials.)