Clearly we’re all ready for the Big Game today—Puppy Bowl X, duh (just kidding, I’m a red-blooded American who will watch the Super Bowl and stream the aforementioned program from my laptop). But there’s another event in adorable athletics happening on Sunday: The Kitten Bowl.
Over on the Hallmark Channel, the Kitten Bowl will compete for airtime with these other two programming powerhouses. It’s hosted by Beth Stern (animal activist and Howard Stern’s wife) and has many of the same supplementaries that Puppy Bowl is offering; a live feed that’s already available, a fantasy league, and the requisite tiny balls of allergy-inducing fluff that tear tiny holes in your heart with their cuteness.
Hallmark is better known for riveting docudramas we (I) guilt-binge on, but Bill Abbott, president and CEO of its umbrella company, Crown Media Family Networks, is also an animal advocate who started a company-wide initiative called the Pet Project.
“Pet Project [uses] entertainment to show the joy that pets bring to our lives and how many beautiful animals are in local shelters just waiting and hoping for a forever home,” Kitten Bowl’s lead publicist Pam Slay told me via email.
“Also, once Bill’s idea flourished, he made sure the shelter he personally volunteers with, North Shore Animal League America and Last Hope, were the shelter partners we used in obtaining the little kittens who play on Su-purr Sunday.” (That is an excellent pun which I shall weave into conversation at some point over the next 24 hours.)
Like Puppy Bowl, Kitten Bowl was taped back in October in New York, and all of the kittens have been adopted. So what else is there to expect from the feline festivities? Slay tells me the energy level is “incredible,” and that there will be some Lambeau Leaps in the mix. And it should be mentioned the kittens are named things like Ferrell Owens and Hairy Rice.
They all have homes now, so you can’t watch the game and pick a kitten to adopt; however, Hallmark has made printed sets of its player profiles to collect as trading cards—and as if things could not get better, we’ve got a set to offer one lucky Daily Dot reader (See Facebook for details). Get ready to take home not one, but 71 adorable faces.
Photo via Kitten Bowl/Facebook