This must be a world record; fifteen police officers working to catch a man who kills and mutilates domestic cats and other small animals.
The case has been covered extensively in online media so I won’t recite it except to say a man or men have killed and dissected almost 400 animals in three years starting in Croydon, London, UK. Most of the animals are outside domestic cats. In the UK this is the default situation.
The Metropolitan Police began Operation Takahe in December 2015. It is staffed by four detective constables, a detective sergeant and ten police constables who are not attached to the operation full-time.
Ten post-mortem examinations have been conducted at a cost of £7,500. South Norwood Animal Rescue is working with the police. They advise cat owners to keep their cats inside at night. I expect they understand that it is all but impossible to expect UK cat owners to keep their cats inside all the time and also it seems that the criminal works at night.
Apparently he wears a torch (I presume on his head) or carries it. He is white and in his forties and has brown hair. There is a £10,000 reward to catch him.
All the cats have been killed by blunt force trauma and then cut up with a knife. The presumed intention is to cause maximum distress to cat owners and perhaps to create a trademark version of cat cruelty and killing.
It is nice to see the police taking this seriously. It will please cat owners and animal advocates as often law enforcement let down cat lovers in my experience of writing about cat abuse for more than ten years.
Source: Times Newspaper
Fiends like this need to be euthanized!
So often the police don’t work hard enough to catch predators like these, so they often don’t get caught. And when they finally do, the punishment is minimal.
It seems in this case, the police work hard to catch that sadistic creature. But why does it take three years and close to 400 murders for them to take it seriously? What if it was ‘only’ one cat? Would they work so hard to catch the bastard then?
Thank God my cats are smart – they’re scared of humans. They won’t let anyone near them, except for me. They’ll bolt whenever anyone but me approaches them. At least I don’t have to worry about them being murdered or mutilated.