NPR News reports that according to a spokesperson for the Ecuadorian Embassy, Assange’s cat ‘hasn’t been with the embassy since the fall’ [link]. Clearly the embassy staff wanted rid of the cat:
“It was taken by Mr. Assange’s associates. We are not a pet store, so we do not keep pets here.”
It looks like the idea of giving Assange a gift of a cat was misconceived. The cat was never welcome at the embassy and Assange is not a cat person or perhaps even a pet person.
The New Yorker reported in 2017 that for Assange everything is about P.R. – promoting himself. The magazine reported on what one of Assange’s friends said:
“Julian stared at the cat for about half an hour, trying to figure out how it could be useful, and then came up with this: Yeah, let’s say it’s from my children….For a time, he said it didn’t have a name because there was a competition in Ecuador, with schoolchildren, on what to name him. Everything is P.R. — everything.”
There has been speculation about the cat who was named Michi. Michi had a very successful Twitter account at 30k followers and an Instagram account with 6k followers.
Both accounts dried up. In May 2016 the Twitter account was alive and thriving. By the autumn of 2016 the feed rate had declined and in 2017 there were three tweets. By 2018 the information had dried to 2 tweets and it fell silent for the past year.
There was speculation that Michi had been sent to a pound! But according to The Washington Post, Hanna Johnson – a member of Assange’s legal team – took Michi to safety as Assange was angry at the embassy staff’s threat to take Michi to an animal pound. I think that was wrong because we don’t take animals to ‘pounds’ in the UK. They go to rescue centres such as Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.
Anyway Michi should be in a decent home living a normal live rather than holed up in a flat with a ‘narcissistic’ self promoter.
P.S. The description of being a narcissist was made by the judge at Assange’s recent hearing for breach of bail. He is currently in jail for that. I support him incidentally. I am one of those.
