This Local #FatCat Has More Followers Than You

Tucker wears a permanent scowl. His green eyes radiate annoyance. The twenty-two-year-old, twenty-five-pound cat doesn’t like the baby stroller in which he rides around downtown Raleigh. He likes it even less when he has to haul his fat ass around the Capitol grounds in pursuit of strategically sprinkled treats. He really doesn’t like basking in the hot April sun or when excited children squeal and approach with huge smiles.

And he certainly doesn’t like you.

“Tucker doesn’t enjoy anything,” says Tucker’s human assistant, Ron Kirk, as he pushes the portly pussycat in a stroller down Fayetteville Street. “He just has varying degrees of dislike.”

Tucker is an old cat, a centenarian in people years, so you can ignore his grumpiness. You don’t even roll your eyes at the fact that he’s being pushed in a stroller. But to look at him, all grizzled and dandruff-ridden and generally gross, you wouldn’t imagine that Tucker had parlayed his almost-daily lunchtime patrols of DTR into something approaching celebrity status.

But he has. Or, more accurately, Kirk has. Their @OakCityKitty Instagram account has more than seven thousand followers, and Tucker has better name recognition downtown than most local politicians. In the span of a few blocks, I watch him encounter—and mostly tolerate—more than a dozen adoring fans.

Read more: https://indyweek.com/news/wake/raleigh-fat-cat-tucker-instagram-meme/

Posted because this group needs a cat thread.


Photo: Andrea Rice