Social media made ‘cat tours’ viral in 2024. Now Sacramento has its own
There’s a popular internet meme that reads, “The best thing about being alive is that sometimes there’s a cat,” usually written over a photo of a cat.
A new event in Sacramento intends to replicate that feeling by bringing people to the cats.
On Sunday, NorCal Resist, a community activist group, hosted its first NorCal Resist Cat Tour around Sacramento. Attendees walked and drove around to different parts of Sacramento County to visit sites where volunteers offered visitors the chance to meet their feline friends or observe them from a window. Then visitors could go on to the next site as if trick-or-treating for cats instead of candy. Many of the sites offered merchandise for sale or freebies such as water, cat toys or even clothes.
The idea for the cat tour was inspired by a similar event in Minneapolis that spurred a national media frenzy in 2024, according to Jackie Va, a NorCal Resist volunteer who pitched the event. Va says a video of the Minneapolis event and a cat sticker handed out at a NorCal Resist event led her to create a Sacramento version.
“I brought it to NorCal Resist and said, ‘We need to do this,’” Va said. “So I’ve been organizing this event since December.”
Known more for organizing around political issues, hosting protests and offering mutual aid rather than cat tours, NorCal Resist volunteer Autumn Gonzales said the event is a way to get more people involved in the organization.
“I think that as an organization we like to help build community, and we want to create mutual aid networks,” Gonzales said. “So finding an event where people can meet their neighbors, do something fun and low-key, and also learn about our programs is kind of a win-win for us.”
Sunday’s event featured over 20 sites across the region where visitors could see more than 60 cats in all. To attend, visitors followed a link from NorCal Resist’s flyer to fill out a Google form and offer an optional donation of a few dollars. Visitors were then sent a map of the locations.
According to Va, about 1,000 people filled out the form to get the map.
“I was there at the tour site number one, and it was a steady flow of like 10 or 15 people every hour,” Va said.
At a stop on 18th Street in midtown Sacramento, Ari Culbertson sat with his cat Winnie in a big playpen as he offered free water and donated clothing to passers-by. His other two cats, Ursa and Baby, watched from inside as visitors waved cat toys through the window. By 10:30 a.m., about 50 people had stopped by to see the cats, according to Culbertson.
“I love cats and I love my cats a lot. So it’s really nice to be able to interact with the community and introduce them to our cats,” Culbertson said. “They’re always in the window and people are always walking by and saying hi to them. So it’s an excuse to say hi to our neighbors and meet them face to face.”
Friends Olivia Herider and Brittany Henry, who were walking around to the different sites, said they also enjoyed the community aspect of the tour.
“I was just thinking, if I was ever down here and I needed help, I’ll remember this house was in the cat tour and a like-minded person lives inside,” Henry said, “I think we should do every animal, fill in the blank, tour.”
Organizers Va and Gonzales said the tour will not only serve as a fundraising opportunity for NorCal Resist, but also as a way to get more people to think about adopting an animal that needs a home.
At the last stop on the tour, Sacramento County’s Bradshaw Animal Shelter, a poster for the cat tour featuring some of the shelter’s longest feline residents hung on the wall outside the door. According to volunteers, all the cats on the poster had been adopted by the time the tour was over.
The foster program coordinator for the shelter, Rhea Stites, said it was hard to know whether the tour directly led to those adoptions, but that any positive event around the shelter helps adoptions.
“There’s a stigma around shelters,” Stites said. “People think they’re sad, but an event like this shows that it’s not all sad.”
