29 Nov, 2016 @ 11:30
2 mins read

How to make millions from a cat

belinda coluymn
belinda-coluymn
Grumpy cat

I’M thinking of auditioning for a cat.

There are felines out there earning nine figure salaries for their humans.

It doesn’t sound fur real but just ask Patricia Carlin, author How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity: A Guide to Financial Freedom.

Your pet doesn’t even have to be talented to get onto the Furbes (sic) Rich List.

Take Keyboard Cat, a video of a ginger tom dressed in a blue shirt ‘playing’ an electronic keyboard that went viral in 2007, although the cat was in fact dead (since 1987).

His pawformance was entirely computer-manipulated.

Keyboard cat
Keyboard cat

Nevertheless Fatso, as he was called, earned his American owner furnomenal sums from his mew-sical turn – over 45 million views, and counting – along with puss-thumous cameo roles in Hawaii

Five-0 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

There are two million cat videos circulating on YouTube, averaging 12,000 views each.

Get the advertising right and you could be putting a lot more away in the kitty than the £250 You’ve Been Framed pays.

It makes me highly pussed-off  to realise that my ticket to early retirement and a dream holiday in the Maldives was sitting right in front of me … for 16 years.

Alas, Greystoke is swinging on door handles in heaven now – which is how he opened them, single-pawed.

I’d be sound asleep and after a few clunk-clicks (cat leaping at bedroom door, paws slipping off handle), he’d come flying through with a piercing yowl like Tarzan of the jungle.

Lil Bub
Lil Bub

I thought it was a burglar the first time and actually it was. A cat burglar.

If I’d had the presence of mind to video it, we could all have been eating kobi beefsteak dinners by now, like Lil Bub.

The runt of a feral litter, she hit the big time in 2011 because of her cute, bug-eyed perma-kitten look, the happy result of a debilitating bone condition called osteopetrosis (and that is not a pun).

Bub produced a single for Breeders guitarist Kelley Deal, interviewed Michelle Obama on her YouTube channel and has met Robert De Niro, hiss spit.

But for the Kim Kardashian of the kitty world, (net worth, not looks) Grumpy Cat takes the Friskies biscuit (and they endorse her).

Born in 2012, GC had clawed in $100m by the time she was two. Her sourpuss face, caused by feline dwarfism and an underbite, has proved to be her fortune.

Garfi, the world's angriest cat
Garfi, the world’s angriest cat

And this New York magazine cover gal’s got it all – the agent, the New York Times bestseller, the Facebook page with over  seven million licks (I mean likes), an animatronic waxwork at Madame Tussauds, even her own brand of beverage – Grumppuccino coffee.

We do have one surviving cat.

But Blue is way too long in her two remaining teeth to show any interest in the performing arts or winning a Golden Kitty at the Cat Video Festival (unless it’s made of Catisfaction cat treats from Carrefour).

Last year’s festival at Minnesota State Fair outsold Depeche Mode!

Shironeko
Shironeko

So I’m talent-scouting for a male moggie with cattitude.

He doesn’t need to be purrfect in the looks department; he can even be smelly, like the cat that made a fortune for Friends’ Lisa Kudrow – although I as I am a cat lover I draw the line at dead, even if a passed-on puss does have a certain ‘ex-factor’.

I could even get two of them and reform The Pet Shop Boys!

Belinda Beckett (Columnist)

Belinda Beckett is a qualified journalist and freelance writer based in the Campo de Gibraltar, specialising in travel & lifestyle features and humour columns.

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