Born June 21, 2011. Found weeks later as the runt of a feral litter in a tool shed in rural Indiana, and taken home by a man who was not looking for a cat.
Lil Bub had feline dwarfism and osteopetrosis, a rare bone disease that kept her kitten sized for her whole life and made moving around hard. She was the first cat ever documented with it. She also had extra toes on every paw and a lower jaw that never grew in, which is why her tongue never stayed inside her mouth.
Mike Bridavsky, who ran a recording studio in Bloomington, took her in as a rescue in July 2011 and started posting photographs of her that November. None of it was a plan. The internet found her within weeks.
Her genome was later sequenced through a crowdfunded research project, which turned up two separate mutations behind her condition. One of them is the same gene that gives Hemingway cats their extra toes.
Bridavsky set up Lil BUB's Big FUND for the ASPCA, the first fund in the country dedicated to special needs pets. Over her life she raised more than seven hundred thousand dollars for animals with the same kind of problems she had.
She also helped fund an expansion of the veterinary teaching hospital at Purdue, where the vets who kept her walking worked.
Lil Bub & Friendz premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2013 and won its category. It follows Bridavsky and Bub through the strange first year of being recognised in airports because of a cat.
She went on to a talk show, a book, a magazine column and a table at conventions where people queued for hours, mostly to say thank you.
The running joke for years was that Bub was not from this planet and had been left here by mistake. Bridavsky leaned into it constantly, and the starfield portraits are part of why she is remembered as a character and not just a photograph.
She died on December 1, 2019, at eight years old, having outlived every prognosis she was given. The fund is still running.
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