California (US), August 16, 2017: The cat lovers never got as happy as they were today, in the largest celebration of cats in the USA. In Pasadena, California, 'CatCon' held an event in the celebration of cats, Al Jazeera has reported. It was a cat convention where people gathered from across various places. The uniqueness of the event was that it was themed, focused, and organized for and with cats. Cats of all shapes and species were present and it was a great delight for the visitors and the cat lovers.
"One of the reasons that I started CatCon is that there is no equivalent to the dog park in real life for cat people", the creator of CatCon, Susan Michaels said to Al Jazeera.
According to the reports, attendees arrive from multiple professions. It has also been observed that some of the attendees or participants made an appearance with an agenda of making political statements with underlying irony. Brooklyn artist J Morrison, who designed the "kittens against Trump" t-shirts, made a statement.
"Kittens against Trump was an idea to take something very dark and depressing about our current politics and make it fun and humorous and make people laugh and try to keep moving forward," Morrison said.
One of the major attractions of the event was the famous cats from Instagram. For example- the Nala Cat, which has about 3.4 million followers on the social media site. The owner of the famous cat, Pookie said to Al Jazeera, "Some people say that they thought she was not a real cat because her face looked like a cartoon from Disney or something. And then her photo made people happy, and one day her photo went viral and after that, all the followers just kept coming."
People dressed up as cats and entertained the visitors, which was a happy experience for all. Apart from the Instagram cats stealing the limelight, another major importance of the event was that there was an option to adopt the stray cats, which is pivotal for animal welfare.
About 150 cats were adopted and went to their new homes at the convention of this year. This is a path breaking and also a commendable act on the part of CatCon and the organizers. Not only the option to adopt the stray cats, but CatCon made a fair amount of charity, as according to Al Jazeera, CatCon reportedly has made a donation of above $70,000 to various cat-charity organizations since its launch two years ago.
The official website of CatCon views their mission as spreading goodness and joy to all the cats out there and those people who love them. CatCon calls itself the convergence of pop-culture and cat-culture that is one of the largest adoption-lounges in the world, showcases and promotes world's best cat focused merchandises, and sparks up conversations with the ultimate cat-lovers around the globe.
The official charity-beneficiary of the 2017 convention was the Ian Somerhalder Foundation, an organization in the US, for animal welfare.