Animal Welfare
A Shelter Cat Named Diesel Just Got Adopted by Elon Musk
The Riverside County Animal Refuge says the six-year-old tabby — passed over for four hundred and eleven days — went home Tuesday afternoon with the world's most-photographed billionaire. The shelter's phone has not stopped ringing since.
For four hundred and eleven days, Diesel was the cat nobody took home. He arrived at the Riverside County Animal Refuge in June of last year as a stray, six years old, twelve pounds, with a torn left ear and an indifference to visitors that staff came to describe with a certain affection as "professional."
On Tuesday afternoon, he left in a hard-sided carrier carried by Elon Musk.
"I checked the paperwork three times," said Danielle Ortiz, the refuge's adoption coordinator, who processed the application herself. "Not because of who it was. Because it was Diesel. I had genuinely started to think he lived here."
Refuge staff said the visit was arranged through an intermediary the previous week and that the shelter was asked not to publicize it in advance. Musk arrived shortly before two o'clock, spent roughly forty minutes in the cattery, and completed the standard adoption application — the same four-page form, staff noted, that every adopter fills out, including the question about whether other animals live in the household.
He answered yes. The adoption fee was $95. He paid it.
He sat on the floor for about twenty minutes and did not try to pick him up. That's actually the right thing to do with a cat like Diesel. Most people don't know that.
Four hundred and eleven days
Adult cats are the hardest animals in any shelter to place, and Diesel had most of the disadvantages at once: he was middle-aged, large, undramatic in appearance, and he did not perform for visitors. Kittens at the refuge are typically adopted within nine days. The median for a cat over five is one hundred and thirty-two.
Staff had featured him in the shelter's monthly newsletter eleven times. He appeared on a "Long Stay Legends" flyer taped to the front desk. In April, a volunteer photographed him in a small knit hat, which the refuge's director, Wendell Amaya, later described as "an act of desperation on our part, and an indignity on his."
"You get attached in a way that isn't good for anybody," Amaya said. "There's a point where you stop imagining the animal leaving. We were past that point with Diesel."
The morning after
The refuge posted a single photograph to its social accounts on Wednesday morning with a two-line caption. By that evening it had been shared widely enough that the shelter's phone line, normally staffed by one part-time employee three afternoons a week, went to voicemail one hundred and forty times.
Amaya said the refuge had received seventy-one adoption inquiries in thirty-six hours, against an ordinary weekly average of nine, and just over $60,000 in online donations — roughly a fifth of its annual operating budget. Eight of the shelter's fourteen long-stay adult cats had applications pending as of Wednesday night.
"I want to be careful about this," Amaya said. "One adoption is one animal. It doesn't fix anything structural. We have sixty-three animals here today and we will have sixty-three next month. But it did put every one of them in front of people who weren't looking at them on Monday, and I'm not going to pretend that's nothing."
The refuge has asked prospective adopters to be patient with response times and said it is not able to accommodate visits without an appointment this week. It has also asked people not to travel to the shelter hoping to see Diesel, who is, staff emphasized, no longer there.
A representative for Musk did not respond to a request for comment. Ortiz said the adoption record lists the cat's name as unchanged.
"He's still Diesel," she said. "That was the one thing I asked."
Note: The Riverside Ledger is a fictional newspaper built as a demonstration of a static news site. This article is invented. The shelter, its staff, the cat, the quotations and the events described here do not exist and did not happen, and nothing in it should be read as a report about any real person.