Karl’s cat far from richest pet
As you might expect from a high-earning international model, Mademoiselle Choupette is sleek and wellgroomed and favours a haughty expression. She has also been known to scavenge caviar from hotel dustbins.
Now Choupette, a birman cat who once earned $5.7 million in a year by modelling for a cosmetics brand and a German car maker, is set to hit the big time. She reportedly stands to inherit some of the $286m left by her owner, the designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died last week.
Choupette was treated as though she was the closest he had to family. ‘‘I never thought I would fall in love like this with a cat,’’ he once said. Her care was entrusted to two maids and she always had her own hotel room when travelling.
Yet Lagerfeld wasn’t alone in wanting to be sure that a beloved pet would continue to be pampered when he had gone. The price comparison website Compare the Market compiled a pet rich list last year that featured 35 wealthy animals: mostly dogs and cats, but also an African parrot, a chimpanzee, a bear and a Scots dumpy hen called Gigoo that inherited a $19m nest egg from the publisher Miles Blackwell.
Some of these well-heeled pets have humble origins. A black cat called Tommaso was a stray taken in by Maria Assunta, an Italian property developer. After his owner died in 2011, Tommaso inherited property reportedly worth $19m. However, animals cannot inherit in their own right under Italian law (and it’s rare that they’ve enjoyed success themselves as property investors), so the legacy was administered by Assunta’s nurse.
For some owners it’s not just about the money. The singer Dusty Springfield, who died in 1999, not only left an undisclosed fortune to her 13-year-old ragdoll cat, Nicholas, but also wrote detailed instructions about his care into her will. The cat had to be fed baby food imported from America, she ordered. He should have access to an indoor tree house, he must be lulled to sleep every evening by Dusty’s pop hits and his bed must be lined with her pillowcase and nightgown.
If pets can inherit wealth, they can pass it on too. The fat cats of the pet world, at the top of Compare the Market’s list, are the Gunther dynasty of german shepherd dogs. They came into money when Gunther III was left $95m in trust by his German owner, Countess Karlotta Liebenstein, who died in 1992.
Gunther’s advisers invested wisely and his offspring’s fortune is now said to be about $548m – making Gunther IV a true heir of the dog. – The Times