Police called in after pet groomer “skinned elderly cat alive”

The cat’s owner, Jamie Maietta, says that the commercial pet groomer skinned her cat alive when all he was in for was to remove some matting in his fur.

When Jamie saw her cat she started to cry because of the state his was in. However her description of being skinned alive was a slight exaggeration to say the very least. The skin has been cut and irritated.

I can’t show the pic here because of advertisers. Please click on the link below to see it.

Badly groomed cat (Luther). The photo is by Jamie Maietta.

It was a bad and crude job of work it seems to me. The groomer, Kelly Weymouth, in her defence says that Luther was in poor condition when she received him and his matts were tightly knotted.

Weymouth says that she warned Jamie that the grooming would irritate the skin. She also claimed that Luther’s age caused the skin to be less robust which meant that it was impossible to remove the matts without causing some irritation of the skin.

“His skin though is that a 90-year-old person….and to take mats off from that is impossible without causing some type of irritation.”

However, the argument put forward by Luther’s owner, Jamie, is sound I believe (except for the exaggeration). She said that Kelly should not have groomed her cat if she had known that it would cause this sort of skin irritation and damage.

I would have thought that a good cat groomer would have told the owner that it would take longer and be more expensive than usual to groom the cat and therefore charged more. That would have allowed her more time to do an extremely careful job. It may have been wise to have the owner in attendance during the grooming at least initially. That would have got the owner “on board” and aware of what was going on. Or, alternatively the groomer should have refused and advised the owner to take her cat to the veterinarian.

My guess is that Kelly was going to fast and too roughly for financial reasons.

Jamie is complaining to the police. This is not a criminal matter in my opinion. It is not cat abuse in a criminal sense. It is bad grooming and therefore a civil matter, potentially a breach of contract. Calling the police will make matters worse.

Although it does not affect the contract between cat owner and groomer because the groomer accepted the work, the cat’s owner has arguably been negligent in letting her cat become so badly matted.

Source of the story.