India: man throws neighbour’s rescued cat from 16th floor of high-rise building

This story is really about this individual cat living in a human world where he or she enjoyed only a part of his short life when he was treated with relative kindness. The owner of the cat also appears to have lived on the 16th floor of this apartment building in Thane in the Indian state of Maharashtra (possible correction: he may have lived on the 2nd floor). His name is Gani Shaikh. This man likes animals because he has other cats and a dog in his apartment. He probably had too many bearing in mind that it is an apartment.

Originally a rescue cat

We are told by the International Business Times that the cat’s owner, Shaikh, had rescued the cat from a restaurant about a year ago “where it was tethered”. So this cat appears to have been permanently chained up to something or other at a restaurant in the early part of his life. We are also told that the cat was about-year-old when he was thrown from a window in a passageway on the 16th floor.

Harm child?

The man who allegedly did it is Shivram Panchal. Apparently, on more than one occasion, the cat had wandered into his apartment and he was worried about the cat’s presence because he feared for the safety of the baby in his home. He lives with his son, grandson and his daughter-in-law. Perhaps he believes false information that cats are dangerous to babies. It may have been the case that the accused’s grandson had brought the cat into his home to play with. If this is true it makes it even more upsetting.

Maid tried to stop him

Another aspect of the story is that the accused’s maid requested that he did not harm the cat. She even tried to stop him but he wouldn’t listen. He took the cat to an open window, by the scruff of his neck, in the passageway outside his apartment and dropped him to the ground. The cat was killed in the fall. There’s lots of talk about cats being able to fall long distances and survive. They often do, in fact, but on this occasion the cat was unable to break his fall sufficiently to survive.

This brave maid had already tried to stop her employer from being cruel to this companion animal and she then gave evidence to the police against her employer who I would presume is now her former employer. There is also CCTV footage which shows Panchal angrily dropping the cat from the high-rise building. He’s been arrested and released on bail. He appears to be a fairly elderly individual (believe to be 64-years-of-age). There also appears to have been background hostility between these neighbours over the cats.

Persian cat?

The online newspapers refer to the cat as a Persian cat. This probably isn’t true. They tend to describe cats in this careless way in India. This is not, I hope, being overly critical but, as I say, it is unlikely to be true. The cat would have been a random bred cat with longhair which would encourage locals to describe the cat as a Persian.

Postscript: the various online news media websites provide unclear information as to whether the cat was dropped from the 14th, 15th or 16th floor of the building. Not that it makes a lot of difference.