Indian celebrity actresses such as Disha Patani indirectly promote cat welfare

We are seeing more news media articles about celebrity Indian actresses with their domestic cat companions in loving embraces and I love it because it will boost cat welfare and I would hope animal welfare generally in India. 

Disha Patani with her purebred cat. Photo: Instagram.

It appears that the best-known Indian actresses are admired by Indian citizens and therefore they have a role to play in modifying the behaviour of people. They can lead the way and we often see, nowadays, these wealthy Indian actresses living in fancy apartments in cities with glamorous, full-time indoor, purebred cats. 

They make for good photographs but the underlying message I would hope comes across which is that cats should be treated in a kindly way and looked after well. They should not be street cats living miserable lives as so many do in India and of course in other countries. I'm not going to criticise India for this because there are far too many unwanted, stray and feral cats in the world for my liking. It is a symptom of a failure in the domestication of the cat. It is time we made more effort to stop it.

So here we have Disha Patani, an Indian actress who works primarily in Hindi films I'm told by Wikipedia. I am also told that this is her real name and it seems that she is trained as an engineer. Is that correct? It might well be.

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Note: This is an image from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.

In the photograph on her Twitter tweet, we see her cuddling what I believe to be a Himalayan purebred cat which is a pointed Persian cat. In this instance I think this is a lynx-pointed Persian. Or the cat is a Ragdoll. The cat is certainly purebred. The photograph has received 1.6 million likes in 19 hours!! She has 44 million followers! That is the power of female celebrity. Let her use it to the betterment of animal welfare, please. She can do so much. I don't know whether she is involved in animal welfare matters and whether she campaigns on animal welfare issues. I hope so because, as mentioned, she has the clout to make some changes in the right direction. And there is a real need in India to improve animal welfare.

There are too many sad, street cats for my liking but, as mentioned, that applies to very many countries in the world. So, we can't single out India as that would be unfair. India does have a fledgling cat fancy by the way. I think I may be partly responsible for instigating the beginning of the cat fancy in India. They do like their purebred cats but they seem to be confined to the Persian which is by far their favourite and which they call the "punch-face" Persian. Not a great description because it implies that you punch the face of a cat to squash it and make it flat which is the requirement under the breed standard (the flatness not the punching!). That is another story because flat faces are not healthy faces! It distorts the facial anatomy leading to breathing and other problems.