The 20-year-old cat, dubbed Mayor Stubbs, who survived a dog attack in 2013 and a false report of his death last year, died in his sleep last Thursday night. He was mayor of Talkeetna, a town of about 900 some 100 miles north of Anchorage. The town elected the yellow cat mayor in a write-in campaign in 1998.
There is no human mayor in the town.
Lately, the elderly cat had been keeping close to home, but in his younger years, he was known as a cat-about-town–usually meowing up a storm at Nagley’s General Store.
And while it’s sad that Stubbs has passed, another kitten in might be ready to take up the mayoral mantle.
“Amazingly, Denali has the exact personality as Stubbs,” the family wrote of the kitten. “He loves the attention. He’s like a little puppy when he’s around people. We couldn’t have asked for a better understudy than Denali — he really has followed in Stubbs’ paw prints in just about everything.”