Nate Lanxon

Friday 25 April 2008, 10:18am

YouTube cat lover saves lives, attracts women

If you love cats and YouTube, chances are you've seen The Engineer's Guide To Cats. It's my favourite video of 2008 and it's just ticked past 1,000,000 views since February.

But seeing creator Paul Klusman's other videos, it's clear there's much more to him than being fanatic about felines -- the guy's nothing short of a cat live-saver.

"I can has YouTube exposure?" -- one of Paul's own cats

At the current count, Paul has rescued a total of two adorable, homeless cats. But he's not just taken them in, as owning three cats is -- understandably, as I know only too well -- enough for any one person. Instead, he has made short videos detailing the cats' great qualities and appealed on YouTube for kind, loving cat-lovers to re-home the animals, the first of which was called Woody.

"I felt it would take a patient and kind person to adopt Woody," amateur video maker Paul told me in an email, "and I decided a video would be a good way to illustrate his personality without the inconvenience of people having to make arrangements to see him in person and then possibly decide they weren't interested."

The gorgeous Woody has since been happily re-homed via YouTube, and went to a young couple who had recently lost one of their two cats. But it's not just the cats who are doing well out of videos' huge popularity.

"An unintended consequence of the cat rescue videos has been [to] further establish my reputation as a caring 'cat guy' throughout the Internet," Paul said. "With an apparent shortage of 'cat guys' around the world, I've received several hundred declarations of love or requests for marriage from 'cat ladies' since the video started gaining large popularity about two weeks ago."

"The video has [also] given me tremendous exposure and I've received offers to do additional film and video work."

It's people such as Paul who highlight YouTube's incredible versatility, not only as a medium for expressing opinion, but for allowing people to do good deeds in a way never before possible. As a fellow cat and animal lover, he has the utmost respect and admiration from me. Keep it up, Paul. You're making a difference.

Check out Paul's other adoption video, for the excellently named Reginald. And be sure to assist him with the request he made in his follow-up video -- hopefully some of our millions of readers will help get The Engineer's Guide To Cats on the YouTube homepage.

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