Lauren Carter admitted she poured bleach on cat food on two occasions in April, police say.
The video shows a woman stop her car, get out holding a bottle of what looks like bleach, and pour the substance onto food left for outdoor cats while a tabby looks on, sniffing curiously.
The footage was recorded by a family in Chester, Pa., a town of 32,000 about 25 miles southwest of Philadelpia. The cat, Jumper, belongs to a family on the same street.
The suspect’s name had been floating around on various cat-related social media sites along with the video for weeks, but police and prosecutors had to be sure of the facts before they arrested the woman.
When lab results showed the substance was indeed bleach, officers arrested 35-year-old Lauren Carter, also of Chester.
Cops and the SPCA’s law enforcement division say Carter admitted to pouring bleach on cat food on two occasions in April. It isn’t clear why Carter wanted to harm cats, and so far law enforcement hasn’t made any comments about her motivation.
They did, however, make sure local pets did not eat the poisoned food.
“We do believe based on our investigation that no animals did consume the food,” SPCA spokeswoman Gillian Kocher told KYW, a local news radio station. “Our officers went out through the area to make sure that no animals were sick or deceased, but it is, of course, our intention that this doesn’t happen again, and the animals in the neighborhood are kept safe.”
Carter has been charged with two counts of misdemeanor animal cruelty.
Olivia Oliver, Jumper’s caretaker, said she was satisfied with the outcome of the investigation and Carter’s confession.
“I think it’s enough. I think it’s a good sign; it’s a warning for her,” Oliver told WPVI, the Philadelphia-based ABC news affiliate. “And basically, I’m glad she’s going to pay for what she did. And hopefully nothing like this happens again around here.”
The Youtuber known as Xing goes to extraordinary lengths to create scaled-down places for his cats to play and lounge in within his Cat Town.
Xing, the Youtuber who previously turned heads by building a working subway system for his cats, isn’t finished transforming his Cat Town into a one-of-a-kind extravagance for his little buddies.
The Youtuber’s latest creations are a 3,500-seat, air-conditioned, to-scale feline basketball arena with its own real hardwood court and a cat hotel.
Xing also showed off the exterior of Cat Town, which has a McDonald’s and several empty buildings.
He’s soliciting ideas from viewers on what he should build next. While I love the subway and the arena, I think he should try something a little more practical, something his cats will definitely use. The cat hotel is different, since it’s entirely possible one or more of his cats will use the hotel room as a private getaway, but it does raise an interesting question: what would a cat want?
For most cats, including Xing’s fluffy Maine Coon, a pool wouldn’t be a great choice, but what about a hot tub? A Japanese capsule-style hotel with cozy rooms that fulfill the feline desire for tight spaces? A bowling alley where cats can knock pins over to their hearts’ content? A town park? A golf course filled with sand traps for…uh, never mind that last idea.
Here are some shots of the hotel lobby, elevator and guest rooms:
And here’s Xing showing off the impressive scale of Cat Town. He says he’s got a lot more room to build, so we won’t see an end to these impressive projects any time soon.
Junie the cat is a friendly tabby who was taken by an Amazon driver delivering a package to her family’s home in Bakersfield.
First, please allow me to apologize for the light blogging this week. Allergies are absolutely killing me right now and apparently pollen counts are about as high as they get locally, according to weather sites.
I don’t usually get it this bad, but holy crap! I’m stuffed up, my eyes are watering and my head is pounding. Is it possible that one type of allergy can override another? If so, maybe I should grab Bud and take a deep huff. His reaction alone would be worth it.
“What the…what is the meaning of this, human?! Unhand me immediately, and apologize with those Friskies Natural yums that I like!”
Today we have another story about an Amazon driver taking a family’s cat after delivering a package to their home in Bakersfield, California.
The family’s home security cameras captured footage of the driver approaching the friendly cat named Junie on May 14 and driving off with her.
Amazon won’t name the driver and will only say that the company is cooperating with police, according to NBC affiliate KGET in Bakersfield.
Junie Credit: Wilson family
So far Junie hasn’t been returned and Junie’s family has no answers.
I realize that Amazon is a massive company and that millions of deliveries go off without a hitch, but still. There are dozens of incidents involving drivers stealing cats that we know of, many more that preceded our efforts to track the ongoing problem, and the company has a reputation for being unhelpful in assisting customers when their drivers take off with pets. At what point does someone say “Hey guys, don’t steal cats and dogs from our customers”?
Local police are investigating while Junie’s family pleads for the return of their cat. As with several other families who have been in this position, they say they just want her back and won’t ask questions if she’s returned.
“They could just drop her off in the driveway, she knows what to do,” said Brenda Wilson, Junie’s caretaker. “She’ll come straight to the garage, get inside the house.”
PS – Please excuse this test: The Cat Guy is a no good, lousy, rotten content thief! (Wink wink!)
Update, 5:27 pm: I wanted to see if The Cat Guy was manually reposting my content or automatically scraping it. I’ve now confirmed the latter. There are few options for dealing with this, but we’ll see.
Despite rumors of lavish excess, a staff of personal servants and even her own chef, Choupette’s reality is much less extravagant: she lives quietly with Lagerfeld’s longtime former maid in a Paris apartment.
When the people behind the Let-Them-Eat-Cake orgy of excess known as the Met Gala announced 2023’s event would honor the late designer Karl Lagerfeld, the natural question was whether Choupette would show up.
The Birman cat with striking blue eyes was the German fashion designer’s most beloved muse, and he was so besotted with her that he included her in almost everything he did.
Evangelista Choupette Vogue cover
If Lagerfeld wasn’t photographing the fluffy feline in the arms of the world’s best known supermodels or bringing her as his plus-one to fashion world events, he was pining for her presence: she was his favorite subject in interviews, for which he had no shortage of superlatives to describe her.
Initially the plan was not only to include Choupette in the Met Gala fundraiser honoring the memory of her “daddy,” but also to pair her with that timeless icon of taste and high culture, Kim Kardashian.
So Kardashian, working with Choupette’s agent (yes, she really does have one), traveled to Paris to meet with the imperious kitty.
It did not go well.
The ill-fated meeting. Credit: Hulu
The organizers think Choupette did not like the sound of Kardashian’s synth leather jacket, but I like to think the pampered puss found Kardashian too artificial even for the circles she and her late human moved in.
Regardless, after several bouts of prolonged hissing and a lunging attempt at clawing the reality TV star, both parties called a halt and decided Choupette would not be attending the gala.
This detail, along with other interesting tidbits, were revealed in a story published by The Atlantic today.
The lengthy article provides a little more background on how Lagerfeld was instantly converted into a cat servant, as well as a breakdown of the situation involving Lagerfeld’s will.
In short, while everyone in the know agrees Lagerfeld did put aside a considerable sum for his beloved feline’s continued care and comfort, a tax dispute between the French government and his estate has effectively frozen disbursement of Lagerfeld’s money, assets and real estate.
Lagerfeld with Choupette. The designer died in 2019.
An expensive piece of property owned by Lagerfeld is in Monaco, attorneys for his estate contend. French authorities naturally disagree, insisting it’s technically in France, which means there’s a substantial back tax owed.
French law does not allow animals to inherit money, so the sum Lagerfeld intended for Choupette was willed to her caregiver. Not a single Euro has been paid out as lawyers haggle over the tax issue.
Choupette isn’t on the street or anything close to a pauper. She remains in the care of Lagerfeld’s longtime maid, Françoise Caçote, who was the feline’s primary caretaker in the German designer’s absence. They live in a comfortable apartment in Paris, where Choupette eats and naps well, and is watched over by Caçote, her husband and children.
Media reports of a vast fortune, a personal chef serving up gourmet cat food and a round-the-clock team of professional pamperers do not reflect reality, but Choupette doesn’t care.
“The most important thing is that she’s happy, surrounded by love and affection, and protected as Karl would have wanted,” Caçote told The Atlantic’s Chris Heath.
While Choupette skipped the Met Gala, actor Jared Leto went all out with a costume that captured her look.
For Choupette, that’s all that matters. Max Renneisen, a German artist who has painted portraits of Choupette, pointed out our remarkable ability to turn animals into anthropomorphic characters. (A sin I’ve never been guilty of, obviously. Little Buddy dictates his musings and I merely serve as stenographer.)
“All the fuss we do about her, all this concept of celebrity, giving a meaning to her, everything—this is us, for the humans,” Renneisen observed. “Choupette is not a diva. She’s a cat, and we want to see the diva in her.”
It’s the first case successfully prosecuted under a new UK law that treats pets as living beings, not the “property” of a person or family.
It started, as these things often do these days, with an Amazon delivery driver who took a shine to a UK family’s pet feline.
Catalin Stancu, 41, was delivering a package to a home in West Yorkshire this January when he spotted a floofy tabby cat named Nora. When Nora didn’t come back inside that day and was still missing a day later, homeowner Carl Crowthers checked footage from his surveillance cameras and saw Stancu interacting with Nora before picking her up and driving off with her.
We wrote about the theft at the time, noting Amazon hadn’t changed its standard customer service response (“How much would you say your cat was worth?”) to customers traumatized by the company’s drivers stealing their beloved pets.
Crowther also hinted that he’d like to go into more detail, but didn’t want to endanger an ongoing police investigation. Now we know why.
Nora’s family contacted West Yorkshire police, who put Sgt. Cat Ryan in charge of the investigation. Ryan used information from the surveillance videos to track Stancu to his home. Around the same time Stancu, realizing footage of himself was spreading on socials and in traditional media, contacted Crowthers via Facebook to return Nora.
On Thursday, Stancu was sentenced, marking the first time a person has been successfully prosecuted using changes made by the Pet Theft Act.
That law, passed and enacted in 2024, creates a new category for pet thefts recognizing animals are not just property that can be replaced. It gives police new ways to charge people accused of stealing pets and provides judges with more options for sentencing, including up to five years in prison, fines, community service and other sentencing conditions.
It’s also a model for other countries and jurisdictions. Currently, almost every US state law lists pets as property, most under archaic agriculture and markets laws that were meant to settle disputes over farm animals. This is also a subject we’ve covered, noting the numerous advantages of modernizing animal laws so crimes involving pets are treated differently than, say, an argument between two farmers about who owns a particular cow.
Stancu admitted to driving off with Nora before his sentencing, but said despite the fact that she was wearing a collar, he thought she was a stray.
District Judge Paul Marks gave Stancu an eight week suspended jail sentence and ordered him to pay £500 in compensation, which equals about $670 at current exchange rates. A suspended sentence is the UK equivalent of a conditional discharge in US courts, meaning Stancu must stay out of legal trouble for at least a year to avoid serving jail time.
Marks acknowledged that Stancu made efforts to return Nora once the story hit the press, but said his actions still violated the law.
“Whatever your initial motive was for taking Nora, and whatever concerns you had about Nora’s health, you should not have behaved in the way you did,” Marks told him. “Nora was a much-loved family pet and the family wanted her back… The distress they suffered for three days when they knew nothing of where Nora was, was very upsetting.”
In a statement, the family said they’d spoken to Stancu, accepted his apology, and hope the case helps people realize they’re doing more than removing “property” when they take a cat or dog. Nora, they said, is a member of their family.
“We are incredibly thankful and relieved that she was eventually returned safely to us,” the statement reads. “We hope today’s outcome sends a clear message that animals are not objects to be stolen, and that the pain caused to families by these actions is very real.”
As for Sgt. Cat Ryan, she said she was happy to catch Catalin Stancu and return a family’s beloved cat. The Pet Theft Act, she said, made it possible because such crimes are now taken more seriously under the law.
“One look at how happy the Crowther’s have been happy to have Nora home, and see how settled she is to be back, only confirms how important it was for us to achieve this outcome,” she said.
NOTE, 5/15:Stancu’s sentence included £500 in compensation to the victims and a suspended eight week jail term. Under the plea agreement, Stancu will avoid jail if he stays out of legal trouble for the next year. A previous version of this story did not note the jail sentence was suspended.
Pain In The Bud 