This is the hilarious moment a drunk dad-to-be rolled home from the pub and was caught on camera pestering his bewildered cat with cuddles. Self-professed 'happy drunk' Ethan George was spotted holding baffled two-year-old Aura up to the camera before cradling her in his arms after returning home at midnight.
The slurring store supervisor can be heard telling the feline 'I missed you so much' as he pulls her close and affectionately named her a 'sweetheart'. It wasn't until the next morning that the 26-year-old realised his cat-cuddling antics had been documented after wife Kelly George, 29, uploaded the funny footage to TikTok.
The video soon went viral as commenters likened 'happy drunk' Ethan to cat-crazy cartoon Pepé Le Pew, with women left gushing about the close bond he has with her.
Ethan, from Chester, said: "We went to our local on Saturday night. Kelly is pregnant so she only came out for an hour to have a glass of lemonade and headed home. I headed home about midnight and spotted Aura on the driveway. She'd not been at home all day and I'd been thinking 'that's strange, that's not like her'.
"She's both an indoor and outdoor cat - she'll spend most of her time out in the garden. We've just moved house but we still live in the same area, so she could have gone back to the old house.
"I saw her by the door, picked up and gave her a cuddle, I'm a happy drunk. I tried to feed Aura pork pies once we got into the house. I didn't realise I'd done all that until I saw the video in the morning and thought 'oh god, what am I doing?'."
Once content creator Kelly viewed the hysterical display, she uploaded it to TikTok on September 11th where it racked up more than three million views and thousands of comments.
Kelly said: "When I saw the video, I did think it was very like him. He's very affectionate with the cat, especially when he's drunk. We'd only gone out for a coke, so it was a surprise to see him come home in that state. I'd not long got in when he arrived home so I wasn't asleep or anything. When I saw the footage I was howling."
Ethan, who admits he was a 'dog person' before having Aura, said he was pleasantly surprised by people's reactions to the footage captured on their Blink Amazon Doorbell.
Ethan said: "We were on the way to a baby scan the next day, and she'd already posted the video onto TikTok by then. She realised it was picking up views really quickly, gaining a thousand every two minutes.
"I was in another car with my parents and she texted saying 'I'm really sorry but you've gone viral'. I thought 'what did I do last night? Have I done something really daft?'. I'm amazed that the video is getting such nice reactions on TikTok. I thought I'd have the living p**s taken out of me, being a big Mancunian man.
"I thought I'd be absolutely terrorised for it. But some of the stuff I'm reading has been really nice - [with] people asking for us to do more videos.
"I keep getting compared to Pepé Le Pew - not sure if that's a compliment or not. I guess they're saying that because he was in love with a cat. There were a lot of women in the comments who liked the video, writing stuff like 'find yourself a man who likes cats'. I wasn't a cat person until we got her, I was a dog person, but now I've got a proper good bond with Aura."
Kelly said: "The reactions to the video have been good. He's a pain in the a**e but he is proper cute. I had loads of women gushing about him in the comments, they can take him as long as they don't take the cat."
