I was surprised to read this on Reddit.com. About a month ago a member of the Reddit.com website, under the taxidermy section, said that he or she was looking for a source of domestic cat pelts. He said that there were so many cats dying all the time and that their…
“..fur bodies [were] just going to waste. Along the same vein as perhaps Bodyworks I would like to give them another purpose. That purpose is a wall. Please help me Internet-any referrals/ideas/furriers would be appreciated.”
A Reddit.com user CustomCranium responded by saying that he had 50 domestic kitten pelts left (i.e. meaning that he had many more originally) and that he was selling them at $10 each. The original poster who had made the request asked the guy whether he was for real and the response was as follows:
“I’m very much not a figment of your imagination, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m selling kittens for scientific preparations, yes.”
I don’t know whether anything is wrong but it certainly looks wrong and illegal to me. Nobody has made a complaint about this and the administrators of Reddit.com appear not to have investigated it or taken steps in any way to deal with this troubling communication.
In effect, what this guy is saying is that he has many kittens which he is selling for “scientific preparations”. That sounds macabre to me. It sounds, as mentioned, that something illegal is taking place. The sort of questions that you have to ask in response to that statement are, “how did he get hold of these kittens?” and “are they living and is he killing them in order to stuff them or doing experiments upon them to further his taxidermy skills?”
I would have thought that the administrators of reddit.com would be asking questions and taking steps. When I tried to report the matter on the website I found that you are obliged to shoehorn the complaint into a series of topics which do not fit this situation and therefore I found the reporting process to be impossible.
