Monty the cat has become an internet sensation in the year since his owners, Mikala Fuglesang and Michael Bjorn, adopted him from “Kattens Vaern” – an animal shelter near their home in a suburb of Cophenhagen, Denmark.
It was his unusual looks—he was born without the nasal bone in his nose—that first caught the attention of Fuglesang. When most people had overlooked him for that very same reason, she fell in love.
A Diamond in the Rough
“The first time we met Monty, there were no doubts in our minds that he was going to come live with us,” the couple states on their Facebook page for Monty, which boosts almost 82,000 likes.
They quickly found that Monty is special in other ways too – he has an exceptionally kind and sweet personality. Even when other cats lash out at him, he just lays there, calm and quiet, not wanting to pick a fight.
A Cat with a Cause
Born with a chromosome abnormality that the vets do not know too much about, Monty is a kitty with a mission. We interviewed his two-legged staff to find out all about his cause and the difference he has made in just a few months.
How did he become so well known? What led to a Facebook page?
We quickly discovered that he was “leaking” in his sleep. By consulting the vet, we recognized that this was extremely rare for cats to do. It is more of a dog thing to have this kind of defect. So we thought that the issue was due to some kind of psychological problem that was caused by the fact that we had two other cats in our home. So, we went online to find a new cat-free family for Monty.
We created a Facebook page for this search and the response was massive—100 a week. We had a hard time trying to find the right family for Monty, and in the end, we could not do it. Our feelings for him were way too strong. We decided to get a major scan of Monty to see if the issue was due to some physical defects and discovered that was the case. We therefore decided to keep him. However, people were so in love with him and wanted daily updates, that we kept the page up. During the following few months, it simply exploded. We have ever since used this popularity to raise money for charities focused on animals.
How long did it take to get so many fans?
We created the FB page in august 2014 by the end of September, we had about 1,300 likes and we thought that it was a lot. However, as you probably can imagine it exploded – We got almost all of our likes in just 3 months.
We know that one of Monty’s goals is to help shelters like the one he came from. How much money have you raised for animal shelters?
In December we went to the cat shelter from which Monty was adopted and gave them $1,646 (Euros). That was all the money we had earned by that time.
What are your future plans for charity work?
We will simply just keep on doing what we do right now. Of course just in a growing scale by making an App, a children’s ebook and expanding the product category of Monty merchandise.
Making a Difference the World Over
Monty’s main mission is spreading the word that (whether human, feline, canine, etc) ”looking different doesn’t mean you can’t be fantastic.”
And he is doing it, thanks to social media. In fact, Monty gets posts and messages all the time from people whose lives he has touched.
“We received a Christmas letter where a sweet lady told us about her fight against breast cancer,” the couple told The iHeartCats. ”She had won the battle, but now she has only one breast.” In her message, she wrote “…now I’m not perfect, just like Monty.”
Fuglesang said the lady told them that she “is happy about our message to the world and we were very touched by what she wrote us.”
A young girl wrote them who has been bullied throughout her life because her nose looks different than other kids’.
“She told us that she sees Monty as a good role model and he makes her smile because he also has a different nose and he is very popular even though he looks different,” Fuglesang said.
Keep up the good work, Monty, you really are fantastic.