“For the Family You Can Choose. Adopt. Spay. Neuter.”
That’s the message of Succession star Brian Cox‘s new PETA campaign, which sees the head of one of television’s most dysfunctional families share the screen – and a conversation – with an adorable cat from the Mayhew animal shelter named Patches, who has since been adopted into a loving home.
In the accompanying video “interview”, Patches shares with Cox that she’s spayed (“That’s rather personal, but yes”) and wearing her own fur (“I don’t really have much of a choice”) – and he’s quick to assure her that he’s a huge proponent of adoption and a big fan of felines overall. He’s the guardian of two adopted companion cats.
“The thing I love about cats is their independence,” he says. “They can take it or leave it, and that’s their power – that’s their strength. They’re very dependable. They have an instinct about what you need, and sometimes you don’t always know, and then a cat comes, and then you go, oh, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” says Patches.
Brian Cox urges people to do right by cats like Patches by always adopting them from animal shelters and never buying them from breeders or pet shops, which only contribute to the homeless animal overpopulation crisis.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats end up in animal shelters, and many of them have to be euthanised simply because there aren’t enough good homes for them. The solution, as Cox notes, is prevention through spaying and neutering.
Cox joins a long list of celebrities – including Twiggy, Simon Cowell, Sir Paul McCartney, and Joaquin Phoenix – who have teamed up with PETA and its affiliates to promote kindness to animals.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.