San Francisco International Airport has hired a 14-year-old cat, Duke Ellington Morris, onto its team of therapy animals
- A 14-year-old cat, Duke Ellington Morris, is now a therapy animal at the San Francisco International Airport.
- He's part of the Wag Brigade, a group of animals meant to relax passengers before their flights.
Meet San Francisco International Airport's newest therapy animal: 14-year-old cat, Duke Ellington Morris.
The feline has been added to SFO's Wag Brigade, which, according to the airport's website, is a program bringing "trained dogs to the terminals to make passenger travel more enjoyable."
The Wag Brigade has been around for almost a decade, and while it was initially just for dogs, in recent years a pig named LiLou joined the squad, along with a rabbit named Alex, and now Duke. These animals travel around the airport and can be spotted wearing vests labeled "Pet Me!"
Duke's addition to the Wag Bridge is not his first foray into animal therapy work. In an interview with SFGate.com published Friday, Duke's owner, Jen Morris, spoke about his backstory.
In the interview, Morris says she adopted Duke, a feral cat found in San Francisco, in 2010 when he was a year old. Given his relaxed demeanor, Morris got him certified to be a therapy cat, and he started working with patients at different hospitals.
"He used to go to UCSF for visits at the ICU. And they would wheel him in on a cart and people who wanted to pet him got approval from their doctors," Morris told the site. "They would give them a nice scratch underneath the chin.
His work did not go unnoticed and Duke was featured in a 2016 KPIX news story about him cheering up patients at UCSF Medical Center's ICU. He was also profiled by the popular animal website The Dodo.
Per SFGate.com, Duke was originally named Tai Chi Tuxedo, but Morris later renamed him after the jazz legend of the same name.