Tara the hero cat met her adoring public at the Algonquin Hotel the other day, three months after she became an Internet sensation with a video showing her rescuing a 4-year-old boy from a vicious Lab-Chow mix.
“Tara was completely unintimidated and very comfortable eating, cleaning herself and being photographed around a roomful of guests,“ photographer Bettina Cirone told me. The cat fashion show was organized to encourage adoptions from shelters.
The hero cat’s owner, Roger Triantafilo, of Bakersfield, Calif., didn’t bring his son Jeremy, though Jeremy is now completely healed from the 10 stitches that closed the wound in his leg.
When the cat chased the dog off, the entire incident was caught on video from one of the surveillance cameras that Triantafilo, an admitted “geek,” had installed outside their home.
Triantafilo said Tara adopted his family as a kitten when she followed them home from a park, where the kitten had emerged from the bushes.