Dawn O’Porter has revealed that she freeze-dried her cat after it died.
The author, TV presenter and wife of actor Chris O’Dowd said that when her Siamese cat died in 2020 at the age of 16 she “couldn’t live productively without a cat”.
Writing in The Guardian, O’Porter said: “I not only mourned Lilu, but I craved the endorphin hit of feeling fur against my skin. The comforting way she’d walk across me in my sleep, waking me multiple times in the night, more so towards the end, than my very young children.”
O’Porter explained that the process of freeze-drying Lilu took a total of 10 months.
“Although my husband was sad, there was no one who felt the same way as me, and therefore I dealt with her death in the way that felt right for me and no one else,” she added.
“I had her freeze-dried, a process where she was dehydrated using extremely cold temperatures over the course of 10 months, preserving her perfectly to look just as she did on the day she died, and now she sits happily, but 100 per cent dead, on a chair in my dining room.”
O’Porter added that since Lilu’s death, she has adopted two more cats, Myrtle and Boo.
“That brings my household to the grand total of two cats (or two and a half, if you count the dead one in the dining room), two dogs, two kids, and a husband,” O’Porter wrote.
“Apart from the kids and the husband, I have big plans to extend the family even further. I love how pets make a home feel and the community you enter into when you get one.”
Last week, O’Porter revealed that she couldn’t have fallen in love with her husband if he wasn’t an animal lover too.
“I’d met the man I thought I was going to marry, but there was no way I would still be with him if he hated my cat. At that time in my life, she was my priority,” O’Porter explained.
“At the start, it was very difficult,” she added. “After the first night he stayed at my house, she puked on his side of the bed. It was absolutely a protest puke.
“She just knew this guy was a serious problem. He was livid and I had to put her outside the bedroom, which was totally fair enough. But being Siamese, she would howl at the door, and it sounded like someone was being murdered in the corridor.
“Eventually, she crept her way back in and over time, they bonded. He loved her, but he would always joke about what a horrible person she was.”
