This cross-eyed grey cat who looks like a Nebelung, a rare long-haired grey cat, was rescued and adopted at San Francisco Animal Care and Control in June 2018 by animal lover Rachel Krall who adjusted her work hours to make sure that she could get down to the rescue center to see him. She learned that she was successful in adopting him in the evening.
His name is Belarus, a good name. He is currently 2-years-of-age. He found fame on Instagram which is a great social media site for becoming a celebrity cat. He currently has over a quarter of a million followers. He was relinquished by his former owner because they had issues with their landlord. This must have been a case of the landlord objecting to a cat residing in an apartment. Lots of leases in America don’t allow it. Or at least it’s a good reason for relinquishing your cat.
Raising money for shelters
He sells clothes emblazoned with his face on a website called Bonfire. Rachel says that the administrators of the website reached out to her which got her thinking about raising money by selling products online. She has been very generous in donating $6,000 to shelters in 2019 with apparently $4,000 of that going to the shelter from which he was adopted. She had pledged to donate 50% of profits from the sale of products to the shelter for her first campaign but she actually went ahead and gave away 100% of the proceeds.
His squint
I’m interested in his eyes. As mentioned he has crossed-eyes. In other words he has a squint and the technical term is strabismus. Siamese cats not uncommonly have this condition. The Nebelung is a long-haired Russian Blue. And I’ve discovered that after the Second World War, because of a lack of numbers of Russian Blues, there was crossbreeding with Siamese cats. This therefore is the link between the cross-eyed appearance of the Siamese cat and this individual Nebelung cat. He has some Siamese genes in him which he inherited from a Siamese cat which has, in his case, fortunately given him this condition.
In Siamese cats, the condition does not affect their eyesight because their brain compensates and I would expect the same situation to occur with this cat. Rachel says that Belarus has very few apparent issues with his vision. She says that he paws out his water bowl. In my opinion, this wouldn’t be because of the condition. I would suggest that he has almost no issues because of his strabismus. Rachel has done wonderfully well in raising $12,000 with her companion cat for animal shelters.
