Category: cat safety

Another Delivery Driver Steals A Cat, Proving We Need Better Laws

Under South Carolina law pets are considered property, and the maximum penalty for stealing someone’s beloved animal amounts to a slap on the wrist.

Another day, another story about a delivery driver stealing a cat.

This time it happened in Charleston, South Carolina, and while local police worked quickly to identify the woman behind the wheel and arrest her, the feline is still missing.

Daniel and Liza Layfield said they knew something was wrong on Jan. 15 when an AirTag attached to their cat’s collar showed she was several blocks away. After checking their own security camera footage and video captured by other cameras on the street, they saw a local food delivery driver stop her car, scoop up four-year-old Willa, then drive off with her.

The woman tossed Willa’s collar and AirTag nearby. Thankfully, police took the matter seriously and the local community helped spread the word, leading to a quick arrest.

The family is relying on help from the community to find Willa.

But there are two problems that are common to these thefts of opportunity: Willa is still missing, and the most severe charge police could lodge against the suspect is petty larceny. That’s a misdemeanor that carries light penalties (a fine and up to 30 days in county jail) on conviction. That’s not a deterrent.

We wrote about this problem just last week, when the quick recovery of a cat stolen by an Amazon delivery driver in the UK illustrated the difference a stronger law makes.

Stealing a pet in the UK can land the thief in prison for up to five years in addition to fines. Police are more likely to devote resources when the law gives them appropriate charges to file, and five years in prison would make most people think twice about impulsively stealing a family’s well-loved pet.

By contrast, most US states treat pets as property, meaning courts do not take into account their sentimental value, bond with their people, or trauma to animal and human when someone steals a pet. South Carolina is among those states: in that state’s penal code, petty larceny is a charge that applies when someone steals property worth less than $2,000.

The suspect, a DoorDash/Uber Eats driver, has not been helpful in the Layfield family’s efforts to find their feline family member. In the meantime, the family hopes a $1,000 reward will prompt someone to come forward, or that Willa turns up at a local shelter and has her microchip scanned.

“We want to find Willa, we want to know where she is. It’s going to be 20 degrees for the next several days,” Liza Layfield told the local NBC affiliate. “The idea of her being loose and on the run is horrific.”

The Layfields’ daughter holding Willa, who has been missing since she was stolen on Jan. 15 by an Uber Eats/DoorDash driver.

Cat Stolen By Amazon Driver Returned To Family, Investigation Continues

The family posted a short statement on social media but refrained from offering details, citing an ongoing police investigation.

Nora the cat is back with her family.

The tabby cat was stolen from outside her West Yorkshire, UK, home on Jan. 18 by an Amazon delivery driver. Nora’s human, Carl Crowther, checked footage from his security cameras and had a clear view of the driver dropping off a package and scooping up the cat before walking off the property with her.

The incident was widely covered in UK media and while the suspect’s face was censored in news reports, an uncensored version was widely shared on social media by animal welfare groups and regular people who helped put pressure on the driver. Nora’s family worried that the kitty could experience health problems without the medication they give her regularly for a heart murmur.

Crowther’s Facebook post.

In an update post, Crowther said Nora had been returned “safe and well.” It’s not clear if the Amazon employee returned the cat or if police were involved in the recovery. Crowther, citing an ongoing police investigation, said he can’t offer more details at the moment.

“Obviously we are over the moon with this outcome,” he wrote on Facebook.

Unfortunately the theft of pets by delivery drivers has been a recurring story in the news, and there are reports of Amazon drivers making off with cats and dogs going back at least a decade. While there is no official count or centralized list, it’s happened often enough to generate outrage from customers and news coverage from local and national media, which is often key to helping the victims get their pets back.

‘What Is The Monetary Value Of Your Cat?’ Once Again, Amazon Proves Tone Deaf After Driver Steals Cat

A family’s home security camera captured clear footage of an Amazon delivery driver scooping up their cat and carrying her away.

At a certain point, you’ve gotta wonder whether this is a feature, not a glitch.

After yet another incident involving an Amazon driver stealing a pet, the company stuck to its usual script by being absolutely useless and managing to offend its wronged customer.

On Monday West Yorkshire’s Carl Crowther checked his security camera footage, prompted by the sudden disappearance of his cat, Nora. The footage shows an Amazon delivery driver leaving a package at Crowther’s front door, then scooping Nora up before walking off the property with the feline.

When Crowther called Amazon, the company handled it with the same remarkable tone deafness and lack of care that’s become its trademark in cases like this.

“Their response was disgusting, asking what monetary value we’d put on the cat,” Crowther said. “How can you put a value on somebody’s pet?”

Thankfully Crowther’s local police are taking the case seriously rather than treating it as petty crime or beneath their concern, as many US law enforcement agencies do. That’s not entirely their fault, as outdated laws still define cats and dogs as property with fixed monetary value, fungible assets that can be easily replaced. In many states, stealing a cat will result in nothing more than a low level misdemeanor charge that is pleaded down in court.

West Yorkshire police told The Guardian and the Independent that they’ve opened an investigation and “inquiries remain ongoing.”

The video has been published by several UK news sites, but oddly — perhaps due to UK law — the driver’s face is blurred out.

There’s an additional reason for urgency besides Nora’s family missing her, Crowther said. The stolen feline has a heart murmur and takes medication to manage the condition. Crowther said he’s worried she could succumb to stress between the lack of medication and the frightening abduction. Nora does not do well in new environments, he said.

This is just the latest theft in what has become a fairly routine situation for Amazon. For some reason, perhaps because of lack of training or less vigorous vetting, Amazon’s drivers have been in the news much more frequently for stealing pets than drivers for any other retailer or delivery company.

The online retail giant still seems to have no protocol for handling cases like this, with its representatives treating them like typical customer service issues. Thus the questions about placing monetary value on pets and other insensitive questions.

In cases in which victims have been successfully reunited with their pets, they took the initiative and did not wait for Amazon or the police to act.

A Colorado Woman May Have Been Killed By A Puma, But We Should Wait For The Facts

There are lots of questions but very few answers so far related to the death of a woman on a hiking trail in northern Colorado. Authorities have not confirmed a puma attack.

A woman who was found dead on a hiking trail may have been killed by a mountain lion, state authorities say.

Several hikers were making their way along the Crosier Mountain Trail in northern Colorado at noon on Thursday when they came upon a woman laying on the ground and a puma about 100 yards away from her, according to police.

The hikers made noise and tossed rocks to scare the cat off, then one of them — a medical doctor — checked the woman and found no vital signs.

They notified authorities, who launched a massive search by air and ground, closing down the neighboring trails and bringing search dogs into the effort.

The search teams found and killed two mountain lions, who will be autopsied to determine if either had human remains in their stomachs. If they do not, rangers and police will keep looking, as they say Colorado law requires them to euthanize animals who have killed humans, local news reports said.

Pumas, also known as mountain lions, cougars, catamounts, screamers and many other names, are the widest-ranging cats on Earth, found throughout South America, the west of the US, and southern Canada. Credit: Charles Chen/Pexels

It’s important to note that there are no autopsy reports so far. Police don’t know how the woman died, if she was killed by the puma spotted near her, or if the animal approached after her death.

If an investigation does determine a puma was responsible, it’s crucial to place the incident in context. The last recorded fatal mountain lion attack in Colorado was in 1999, and was not confirmed. The victim, a three-year-old boy named Jaryd Atadero, wandered away from the hiking group he was with and was never seen again.

Search efforts in the following days and weeks didn’t turn up anything, but in 2003 another group of hikers found part of Atadero’s clothing. His partial remains were later found nearby.

Police said Atadero could have been killed by a mountain lion, but there’s no definitive evidence and his cause of death remains a mystery.

Aside from that incident, there have been 11 recorded, non-fatal injuries attributed to pumas in Colorado in the past 45 years despite as many as 5,000 of the wildcats living in the state’s wilderness.

Nationally there is some discrepancy in record-keeping, but most sources agree there have been 29 people killed by mountain lions in the US since 1868. By contrast, more than 45,000 Americans are killed in gun-related incidents per year, about 40,000 Americans are killed in traffic collisions annually, and between 40 and 50 American lives are claimed by dogs per year.

Americans are a thousand times more likely to be killed by lightning than by a puma, according to the US Forestry Service.

Despite their size, pumas are more closely related to house cats and small wild cats. They can meow, but they cannot roar. Credit: Caleb Falkenhagen/Pexels

Cougars are elusive, do not consider humans prey, and the vast majority of the time go out of their way to avoid humans. Most incidents of conflict are triggered by people knowingly or unknowingly threatening puma cubs, or cornering the shy cats.

Despite that, there’s confusion among the general public. Mountain lions are routinely confused with African lions, so some Americans believe they are aggressive and dangerous.

Pumas, known scientifically as puma concolor, are part of the subfamily felidae, not pantherinae, which means they are more closely related to house cats and smaller wildcats than they are to true big cats like lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards.

Pumas can meow and purr, but they cannot roar. Their most distinctive vocalization is the powerful “wildcat scream,” leading to nicknames like screamer.

In the Colorado case, police say they believe the victim was hiking alone. Her name hasn’t been released, likely because authorities need to notify next of kin before making her identity public.

This is a tragedy for the victim and her family, and we don’t wish her fate on anyone. At the same time, we hope cooler heads prevail and this incident does not spark retaliatory killings or misguided attempts to cull the species.

A Week After An Amazon Driver Stole A Woman’s Cat, Neither The Company Nor Police Have Any Answers

Amazon says it has identified the driver who stole a California woman’s cat and is working with local police, but they still haven’t recovered the beloved pet.

You’d think it would be relatively trivial to reunite a woman with her cat after an Amazon delivery driver stole the kitty on Dec. 11.

After all, the victim’s own Amazon Ring camera system captured video of the driver walking away with Piper the cat after dropping off a package. Amazon knows precisely who the driver is, where he lives and how to contact him, because he’s a contractor for the company.

And it’s difficult to imagine how it would stretch the resources of the Lakewood (California) Sheriff’s Department to send a deputy out to arrest the guy and retrieve the cat.

The driver picks Piper up by the scruff of her neck, which could cause serious injury in an adult cat.

This wasn’t a high stakes heist by pros with a plan to disappear.

It was a local delivery driver who made an impulsive decision to steal a cat from a customer.

Do the police really think the man is hiding out in a local motel with the shades down and the cat tied to a chair, cutting out letters from a magazine for a ransome note?

Getting Piper back matters very much to Diane Huff Medina and her children, who miss the chatty Siamese mix.

It doesn’t matter at all to the police or to Amazon, which finally issued a statement calling the theft a “horrible act” and saying it was cooperating with police.

“The Amazon Flex delivery partner in question is no longer eligible to deliver to our customers,” an Amazon spokesman said.

That doesn’t help Diane Huff-Medina get Piper back, nor does it help her reassure her children that the feline, who has been with the family for six years, will be returned unharmed.

“Every day they ask, ‘Is she back yet?’ It’s hard to tell them,”Huff-Medina told local media this week.

In our last post, we noted that in cases where people were reunited with their pets, they did not wait for Amazon or the police to act. Neither has the same sense of urgency as an animal’s own family, and unfortunately police are often reluctant to devote time or manpower to these cases because pets are considered property. When the most severe potential charge is petty larceny — which takes into account a cat or dog’s monetary value, but not its emotional value — stolen pets are considered minor crimes.

Huff-Medina has done well to shame Amazon and local police by going to the media and getting Piper’s story out there. We hope she gets good news soon.

Header image via Wikimedia Commons