What was the name of Salvador Dali's pet ocelot?

Salvador Dali will forever be remembered as a very eccentric man, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that he also had some unusual pets. When he was a kid, he had a pet bat, and later in life he developed some sort of obsession with anteaters, presumably because he hated ants since he found them devouring his pet bat’s dead body one day. But although Dali was seen and photographed walking an anteater on a leash in Paris, it seems that the animal was not actually his pet.

Dali’s actual exotic pet was an ocelot named Babou, who even joined his master in fancy restaurants. There is a funny anecdote about a woman who was outraged at the fact that there was a wild animal in the restaurant. Although she yelled at Dali, he kept his cool and explained to the embarrassed woman that the ocelot was, in fact, a house cat, and that he had painted it to make it look “op-art”. She bought it, of course; after all, it was Dali she was talking to.

The ocelot also known as the dwarf leopard, is a wild cat distributed extensively within South America, including the islands of Trinidad and Margarita, Central America, and Mexico. It is also found in the southern parts of Texas.