By Tony
Thanks to some Cats Working peeps and Karen’s family, friends, and friends of family, I’m the featured pet on the Richmond Animal League’s calendar this month!
It’s weird to know that thousands of people are staring at my picture in their homes right now. I guess this is what 31 days of fame feels like.
If you weren’t around last fall, Karen entered me in RAL’s annual fundraising contest for the 2021 calendar. She had no idea it would turn cutthroat and high stakes in the final days and hours. Overall, the contest raised over $80,000 to help homeless animals.
More context: Max, Roc and I started out as immigrants to RAL from other shelters around Virginia so we’d get good medical care and have a better chance of being adopted. As you can see, it worked! The late Yul, Cole and Adele were also RAL alumni.
As the contest unfolded, the top seven fundraisers were dogs. I was in eighth place as the top cat until the last few hours, when the four cats trailing me threw a ton of money into the pot.
But — as when RAL took me and my brother in as sick, starving kittens — I survived.
Eleven of the winners got to pick their months in descending order of their fundraising contributions. Since I ended up in 12th place, I got the month nobody else claimed.
What were those other animals THINKING? July is an awesome month! It’s right in the middle and has a big national holiday with fireworks.
OK, I HATE fireworks. Lately, Karen’s been having strange men do a bunch of noisy work on the house and it’s given me a phobia where I hide under the bed.
We’ve got one calendar hanging on the fridge, and another one is on the bulletin board above Karen’s computer. That means I can be anywhere during the day, but she’s never out of my sight…
The caption Karen wrote for me says…
Adventurous, fearless, funny, inquisitive, intelligent, affectionate. Meet Tony Bourdain Wormald, who overcame a precarious start in life with RAL’s help to become the feline embodiment of his namesake.
Thanks again to everyone who generously helped me and RAL. We promise never to do that to you again.