In the town of Castres, an animal protection association is calling for an end to the cruelty towards cats in the town which has been occurring for several months.
Numerous corpses of mutilated cats have been found in the Laden district, in the town of Castres located in the Tarn department in recent months. The alert was launched by a resident of the city, a former veterinary assistant and also a member of an animal protection association. Questioned by La Dépêche, this resident alerted: “It doesn’t stop anymore…” She says: “A lady came to see me to ask me to come and collect a kitten that she had seen in this neighborhood. A kitten who limping severely and who was walking with her little one, a few months old. She had also spotted another kitten in a catastrophic state, notably with a gouged out eye… On the spot, I did not find these animals, but I came across another completely amorphous cat with four legs and tail burned, probably by acid…” After taking the animal to a veterinary clinic, it had to be euthanized a few hours later.
The young woman confides to the media that she has little doubt that these are intentional injuries. As she specifies: “I’m waiting for the vet’s certificate to know if these are intentional injuries or not, but I have few doubts about that… knowing that when a cat burns its paw on something, it rarely put the other legs. And then, he also had necrosis and ulcers in his mouth. It was really impressive…”
A cruelty to which she is now forced to “get used to”, these events having started around the summer of 2023. And very young torturers are suspected. Indeed, children aged 7 to 10 years old have been seen trying to catch a cat and her young. Asked about this, the former veterinary assistant explains: “I did not witness the scene, I do not know what happened exactly but when I came home from work, I saw the photos where the “We see the two cats broken on the ground with their limbs dislocated…” Another incident of this kind was reported in the town where a little girl threw kittens at her dog.
The resident told La Dépêche that in Castres “it’s a bit like the three monkeys: everyone sees everything, everyone knows everything but no one wants to say absolutely anything so it’s difficult to act”. She does not hide her surprise at the young age of the culprits and adds: “This is not a manhunt and I do not want to incriminate all the young people in the neighborhood because some of them sometimes come to help me to feed the animals and take them out of the street. Here we are talking about a small group of four or five children, very young, and that is what concerns me. This is not normal!” Thanks to the association of which she is a part, this resident would like to raise awareness among the population about the animal cause and to involve the police and the courts in order to put an end to this cruelty.
