Pot Roast — a cat named after the “very special dish” served on “very special occasions” because her owner wanted to gobble her up with affection — has died.
The fluffy black and white feline was a TikTok star thanks to her human’s funny videos that poked fun at the pet she very clearly adored.
“My little bird flew away at 11:47 am this morning,” her owner, who has remained anonymous for privacy reasons, wrote in overlaying text in a TikTok post on Wednesday.
“When I saw Pot Roast this morning I could feel that she was done fighting and even though I wasn’t done fighting for her I let her go. She went to sleep in my arms. In the end it was just her and me. And I am grateful for every moment we had together.”
The video shows the cat’s distraught owner cradling Pot Roast close with a towel wrapped around her pet.
Although it is unclear why the whiskered angel left this terrain for kitty heaven, her owner announced on TikTok earlier this month that Pot Roast had been diagnosed with feline immunodeficiency virus, which attacks the immune system and leaves a cat vulnerable to many other infections, according to Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. Her owner said the virus had spread to Pot Roast’s bone marrow and that she was shocked by the FIV diagnosis.
“She tested negative as a kitten, as did all my other cats, as did every cat we fostered,” her owner said in the video.
She also added that her vet said Pot Roast was “living on borrowed time,” spurring her to respond:
“And I said, ‘Pot Roast invented borrowing time, so jot that down.’”
Ironically, an ongoing joke on Pot Roast’s TikTok account was essentially that the adorably listless and often stiff-limbed cat acted like a corpse, and her owner regularly referred to her as her “taxidermy” cat.
That’s why many people on social media mentioned the nickname “Taxidermy Cat” while mourning Pot Roast online.
Although Pot Roast’s owner’s jokes about the corpse-like feline were somewhat dark, the humor seemed to resonate on TikTok, garnering the cat nearly 950 million followers on the platform. What also made the irreverence work was that the owner clearly loved the cat to death (sorry).
“I just saw her and I was like, ‘Wow, I feel like she’s my soul sister,’” Pot Roast’s owner told the Kansas City alt-weekly The Pitch in May 2021 of the moment she met her future fur baby at an adoption event at Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2014 (when it was still University of Missouri Rolla).
She said that right after the event, she had someone drive her to the shelter that was homing Pot Roast and adopted her right away for $20.
The owner told the newspaper that she thinks the adoption fee was so low because Pot Roast ended up having a lot of medical issues, including feline herpes, stomatitis, as well as potentially another autoimmune disorder that the owner couldn’t afford, but was keeping symptoms managed with medication.
Thanks to Pot Roast’s stomatitis, her teeth eventually rotted and she had to have them all removed — a move her owner told The Pitch made the cat “much happier” and more inclined to eat.
Yet regardless of the money she spent on the cat’s medical issues, the owner, who lives in North Kansas City, didn’t seem to have any regrets about giving Pot Roast a loving home.
“Pot Roast gives me such undiluted joy every single day,” she told The Pitch.
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