A feline that roams New Zealand’s capital city and is welcomed into tattoo parlors, hairdressers and office towers has become a social media star, with 30,000 followers who track his every movement online.
Mittens first came to attention in 2018 after repeatedly wandering inner-city dwellings, including the university, post office and a Catholic church.
After repeated encounters with the cat, an Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) employee started a Facebook page, “The Wondrous Adventures of Mittens,” to reassure locals that the cat was not lost and did not need to be “rescued” — he was just adventurous.
The page now has 30,000 followers, with locals tracking Mittens’ daily activities around town.
A selfie with Mittens has become a bucket-list item for many Wellington residents.
Owner Silvio Bruinsma said that Mittens had similar venturesome habits when they lived together in Auckland, but Wellington’s compact inner city has now made him much easier to track.
Mittens’ brother, Latte, also a Turkish angora, does not share the intrepid streak and rarely ventures more than 20m from home, while Mittens can roam up to 2km.
“He has made Wellington his playground,” Bruinsma told the Dominion Post. “I suppose my philosophy is, he doesn’t like being locked up and I don’t want to give him a life that is miserable.”
Although there was some initial concern for Mittens’ apparently aimless wanderings, locals and visitors now actively go looking for the cat.
Sam Thacker, one of the administrators of the Facebook group and a SPCA employee, has known Mittens for years and describes him as “street smart.”
“Please don’t pick him up and bring him into the SPCA,” Thacker wrote on Facebook. “He has come in too many times with well meaning people. All this means is that his owner has to come and collect him off us! We have had him in with us recently and he is perfectly healthy.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS