Mystery of the cats that Vanish at Night
Paul Sieveking on the disturbing disappearance of our feline friends
IN THE past two months, more than 30 cats have vanished from Hardwicke, Abbeydale and Quedgeley in the neighbourhood of Gloucester. Most went missing when people let their pets out for the night. One clue was the sighting of a white Ford Transit van emblazoned with the words "Bristol Animal Sanctuary" in amateurish red lettering. Inquiries showed that no such place existed.
At 7.45am on May 14, a tall, thin man was spotted putting a cat in a potato sack at Tredworth and driving off in a black Ford Sierra at high speed. At the end of May, reports of seized cats were pouring in from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. In Coleford, a group of children saw two women, one with a blue rinse, drive up in a dark blue saloon car. They grabbed a ginger cat which kicked and struggled and shoved it into the car before making off at speed.
In February, the Teesside Cats Protection League said that 450 cats had gone missing in the area in less than two years. In Telford that month, about 40 black and white cats disappeared. In January, it was the turn of Redruth and Trispen in Cornwall to be visited by the phantom cat-snatchers.
Pet-napping scares occur regularly round the country. In May last year, there was a spate of thefts along the North Wales coast. It was suggested that some cats were used for vivisection experiments or in badger baiting to lure badgers out of their setts.
More than 125 cats disappeared from the Clevedon area of Avon in February and March 1995. Many pet owners feared that their pets were being skinned for the fur trade and ending up as hats in eastern Europe.
Paula Greaves of Petsearch, which tries to reunite owners and pets, was quoted this May as saying: "Thefts are growing. We know hundreds of owners who have missing cats. We believe many of the animals are winding up on the Continent where cat pelts can fetch up to £33.50 each."
A spokesman for the RSPCA, while confirming the disappearances, pointed out that it seemed a lot of trouble to snatch cats in Britain for the European mainland when there was no shortage there to begin with.
Gangs of pet-snatchers supplying pelts for shady and unscrupulous foreign furriers - or meat for fiendish oriental restaurateurs - constitute a well-established theme in urban folklore. In Strange Cults and Secret Societies of Modern London (1934), Elliott O'Donnell relates rumours of cat-snatchers who skinned the animals alive and sold the skins to "foreign Jewish fur merchants".
While the poor financial returns suggest that an international trade in stolen cats is unlikely, there are actual examples of this trade in other countries. Following reports of cats disappearing from Mexican cities in May 1994, for instance, investigators for the World Society for the Protection of Animals discovered that children were being paid a dollar for each cat that they stole.
The animals were stuffed into cloth bags and drowned; then embalmed and shipped to four US importers who supplied them for dissection in high schools, veterinary and medical schools.
The following December, investigators from the same outfit announced that stray pets in the Ukraine were being clubbed, gassed or poisoned to supply a thriving fur trade in cat and dog skins. People in Odessa were paid cash for catching strays, resulting in 14,000 cats and 8,000 dogs being killed each year. They were tacitly supported by local authorities who set "kill quotas".
In Kiev, people could make nearly 50 cents per skin and the trade was neither regulated nor controlled, resulting in many pets being killed along with the strays. The carcasses were sold as food for pets and mink farms or to soap makers.
