The would-be robbers knew the cat was worth money and specifically targeted the victims, according to police.
Two armed men broke into a Connecticut home on Sunday afternoon and demanded the victims turn over their “high dollar value cat,” according to the East Haven Police Department.
The would-be robbers initially tried to force their way into the East Haven house through a rear sliding glass door, but when the victims tried to prevent them from getting in, one of the men simply kicked through the glass, cops said.
That’s when the intruders brandished a handgun and demanded not cash, not jewelry or other valuables, but the cat!
The kitty in question must have been spooked by all the commotion because the frustrated robbers left empty-handed after a few minutes of fruitless searching. They hopped into a blue BMW and sped off, the victims told police.
Cops didn’t offer any description or breed information about the feline, describing it simply as a “high dollar value cat.”
It’s not uncommon for prized breed cats to command $5,000 from prospective buyers, and some breeds like the “exotic” Savannah cat can sell for as much as $20,000.
Bengal cats like the one above are favorite targets of thieves. Credit: jerry u6770/Pexels
While it’s unusual for someone to break into a home and demand a cat at gunpoint, in the middle of the day no less, cat theft is actually a thing.
Thieves most frequently go after Bengals, Savannahs, Maine Coons, Ragdolls and other breeds that can make them a quick buck by selling them to unsuspecting buyers. Surprisingly domestic shorthairs are on several lists of most commonly stolen cats, but a vet tech tells Reader’s Digest that moggies make the list simply because there are so many of them.
Part of the problem is that the penalties for stealing cats aren’t prohibitive. Most states either treat cats and dogs as property that can simply be replaced, or classify theft of pets in archaic agriculture and markets laws, which were designed to deal with disputes over livestock and farm animals, not pets.
In Sunday’s attempted robbery, police found the BMW abandoned in Hamden, a town about 10 miles north of East Hampton. They’re still looking into the unsuccessful caper, telling local media that the attempt was planned, not a crime of opportunity or a random event.
Still, if you have a “high dollar value cat,” it’s worth taking some precautions. Here at Casa de Buddy we’ve installed a feline version of a panic room: a panic box! Reinforced with heavy shipping tape, the thick corrugated cardboard is sure to keep bad guys out while also remaining roomy, yet paradoxically snug.
A Nebraska family is heartbroken after a woman stole their cat right off their porch in broad daylight.
Mr. Kitty was taken under duress, and her absence has left a cold spot on her human’s bed — and in her family’s hearts.
Despite her name, Mr. Kitty is a female calico Manx rescued about eight years ago by Benjamin Strimple, who found Kitty with her leg caught in a racoon trap.
“When we got this cat, it just became my everything,” Strimple said. “Became like my best friend. Every single night I sleep with her.”
Now he’s worried for her safety and hoping for her return after his Ring doorbell caught a woman walking directly up to his porch in Omaha, NE, and taking the unwilling Mr. Kitty by force in broad daylight on Oct. 20.
The video shows the woman approach and hold out a hand. The friendly cat sniffs her hand at first, but pulls away as she leans forward. Mr. Kitty fights back as the woman tries to corral her, but a close look at the video shows the woman using what appears to be some sort of spray device before picking the cat up with both hands.
A screen shot of the Ring doorbell footage showing the suspect stealing Mr. Kitty from her family’s Omaha, NE, porch.Click here to view the video.
She carries Mr. Kitty back to a silver Chevy Malibu and drives away. The suspect is a black female with long hair who was wearing an orange skirt, a brown or black shirt and dark sneakers in the footage. Strimple says he doesn’t know the woman but she looks familiar and he may have seen her in the neighborhood before.
Mr. Kitty does not venture off his property, he said, and spends most of her time indoors or on the family’s porch, where neighbors are accustomed to seeing her.
“I feel like it was like their plans. You know, they seen my cat,” he told KETV Omaha, an ABC affiliate. “I’m pretty sure everyone on the street knows that cat belongs to this house.”
Omaha Crime Stoppers and the Nebraska Humane Society are offering a $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of the woman and the return of Mr. Kitty. Anyone with information on the theft can contact Omaha Crime Stoppers at 402-444-STOP or www.omahacrimestoppers.org. If you know anyone in the Omaha area, please share the story and encourage them to share it on social media.
The theft is not only traumatic for the family, but for Mr. Kitty too, pointed out Nebraska Humane Society’s Pam Wiese.
“I’m sure that [s]he’s probably like, what? What just happened?” Wiese said. “I was just loving up on someone and now I’m no longer home.”
Strimple said the only thing he cares about is getting his furry friend back.
“There’s a lot I want to say, but I would just say, just give her back,” Strimple said. “You know, that’s pretty messed up. We have a lot of family, a whole family sad. Just give her back.”
As cat thefts increase on both sides of the pond, a UK woman’s security cameras caught a pair of thieves trying to stuff a neighbor’s cat into a plastic bin under cover of darkness. The cats are later sold online.
A week after a brazen thief stole a Portland family’s cat off their front porch, a pair of cat thieves were caught on security footage snatching a cat from a residential street in the UK.
The latter is not an isolated incident. A group of amateur sleuths, comprised of people whose cats were stolen and others concerned about the spate of thefts, found several of the missing cats listed for sale on a UK pet classifieds site, Pets4Homes.co.uk.
The latest cat-napping happened in East Birmingham, where home security cameras captured footage of a man and a woman creeping along a residential street shortly before 4 am, armed with cat treats, milk and a plastic bin and quietly searching for neighborhood felines.
East Birmingham’s Charlene Jones told the UK Sun that she was woken up by her dogs, who alerted her to intruders on her property.
“I didn’t notice anything until the dogs started barking, and I looked out the window and caught them in the act,” Jones said. “It all happened around 20 to four in the morning, at this point she was just putting the cat into the bin. I opened the window and the cat escaped.”
In this still from Jones’ security cameras, the cat thieves are seen with the treats, milk and plastic bin they were using to capture neighborhood kitties.
An angry Jones, whose own cat was stolen three weeks ago, confronted the thieves, who claimed they were working for a local animal welfare charity and were trapping strays.
“I went out and spoke to them and she started reeling off all these charity numbers and claiming she worked for them,” Jones said.
When Jones later reviewed the footage she recognized the cat, who belongs to a neighbor a few doors down the street.
“I feel angry,” Jones told the paper. “I have done my own research, she has been selling cats for eight months.”
Jodie Smith of Solihull, a town of about 123,000 about 18 miles from Birmingham, said her family’s cat, Arlo, was stolen in January. A friend later spotted Arlo on Pets4Homes, but the Smiths weren’t able to recover him.
“It’s awful, this is my daughter’s cat,” Smith said. “My daughter can’t go to bed with cuddles from her fur baby. She is absolutely gutted.”
Arlo was listed on Pets4Homes but the family was unable to recover him.
Pet thefts on both sides of the Atlantic have been on the rise since the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020. As entire countries went into lockdown, demand for companion animals skyrocketed, leaving many shelters bare and breeders sold out.
Criminals saw an opportunity and began stealing pets, mostly dogs at first, from yards, homes and kennels, prompting the owner of one lost pet site to dub 2020 “the worst year ever” for dog thefts, according to the BBC.
With exotic cat breeds commanding large amounts of money on the open market, from a few hundred dollars for breeds like Persians to $20,000 for Savannah cats, opportunistic thieves began targeting felines as well. “Moggies,” cats of indeterminate origin or no particular breed, aren’t exempt either. Some may be stolen because thieves mistake them for exotics, while other thieves apparently find it worth their time to snatch cats that can net them $100 or more on sites like Craigslist and Pets4Homes.
In the UK, cat thefts have increased threefold within the last five years, a trend accelerated by the pandemic and the resulting scarcity of cats, especially those with breed pedigree. Police rarely recover the stolen pets, and authorities say some people are targeted after sharing photos and video of their pets online.
Stealing cats is especially easy in the UK, where the majority of people allow their cats to roam free outdoors and the idea of keeping cats strictly indoors is seen as cruel or improper, even though felis catus are domesticated animals and don’t have a “natural habitat.”
In the Portland case, no one has come forward with any solid information in the theft of Kiki the cat despite two relatively clear shots of the suspect’s face and extended footage of her approaching and taking the cat from the Autar family’s front porch on Feb. 20. Like the UK catnappings, the Portland suspect seemed motivated by profit: The family said their cameras also caught the woman checking for open car doors, and the way she grabbed and held the cat — holding him at arm’s length, dangerously carrying him by the scruff of his neck — indicated she saw him as an object, not a living creature.
Karina Autar told PITB on March 1 that her family hasn’t given up hope.
“We are all just getting by, we are coping by putting in all our energy [into finding] him,” she said.
The thief was caught snatching KiKi off his family’s front porch on Feb. 20.
In the UK, Jones is not the only person to confront the cat thieves. Amy Buckley, 29, told The Sun that the woman seen in Jones’ footage also told her she was an employee of an animal welfare organization.
“She came to mine around January, claiming she worked for the PDSA and that they’d had a report about a large number of stray cats in the area,” Buckley told the paper.
She said she was immediately suspicious because PDSA (People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals) is a charity run by veterinarians that provides care, not TNR or general trapping services.
PDSA confirmed the woman does not work for the organization, while local police told the paper they had taken several reports from people whose cats had been stolen and were investigating the thefts. Meanwhile, an RSPCA spokesperson urged caretakers to have their cats microchipped.
In the meantime the victims are trying their best to locate their stolen furry family members, but they’re also angry at the pain the thieves have caused families and children.
“There are other families going through the same heartbreak,” Smith said. “For a lady to have some money in her pocket, she is destroying little children.”
With breed cats commanding prices in the thousands, thieves see pet theft as a quick score. Lack of prosecution has made it an almost zero-risk crime in the UK.
Mandates in the wake of COVID-19 haven’t been especially popular with a weary public, but surveys show one proposed directive has almost universal support in the UK: Requiring all cat owners get their pets microchipped.
Cat thefts in the UK have tripled in the last five years, with the pandemic contributing to the increase since early 2020, police say. Authorities say they hope compulsory microchipping — and consolidating the many chip ID databases into one — will help discourage people from stealing while making it easier to reunite felines with their families.
Thieves mostly target pedigreed kitties over moggies, with Bengals as the most commonly-stolen cats, followed by British Shorthairs and Persians, according to police statistics. Thieves try for breed cats because of resale value, police say.
Dog thefts have skyrocketed as well, with thieves targeting Chihuahuas, Jack Russell Terriers and German Shepards, among other popular breeds. The price of breed dogs has ballooned by as much as 89 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, when demand for new pets and a slowdown in breeding created a boom market.
For context, an estimated 3.2 million British families welcomed new pets, mostly cats and dogs, into their homes since the first lockdowns in late winter and spring of 2020, the BBC reported. Like their counterparts here in the States, UK shelters experienced unprecedented adoption rates as people battled loneliness and depression during the initial COVID waves and last year’s long winter when the virus came back with a vengeance.
“The number one reason behind pet theft is because the prices for pets have gone up drastically,” Becky Thwaites, spokeswoman for UK pet charity Blue Cross, told SWLondoner. “This happened exponentially over lockdown, as responsible breeders stopped breeding due to social distancing guidance, but more people were wanting pets.”
Despite the spike in animal thefts, only about one percent of all such crimes have led to an arrest, according to a public information request by a UK animal welfare group.
Police have been reluctant to pour resources into those cases, partly because the law lacks serious consequences for people who steal animals. While the maximum sentence for stealing a pet is seven years in jail, under current UK law sentences are pegged to the value of the stolen item. (Unlike the US, the UK does not make a distinction between prison and jail.)
But for people who love their cats, it’s not about the monetary value — it’s about sentiment, love and the distress to human and animal when they’re separated.
Abductions instead of thefts
To change that, a new pet theft task force — set up earlier this year to study the growing problem — recommended a change in the law. Instead of treating pet thefts as property thefts, under the proposal they would be treated as abductions, with all the increased charges and consequences that come with the classification.
Treating animal thefts as abductions “acknowledges that animals are far more than just property and will give police an additional tool to bring these sickening individuals to justice,” UK Home Secretary Priti Patel told the BBC.
Advocates say treating pet thefts as abductions makes sense not just as a legal adjustment, but also as a reflection of the way cats and dogs are stolen. While some thieves stalk dog parks and lure pets away with treats, others have taken to more brazen and violent means like taking animals by force and jumping people while they’re walking their dogs.
The change would require owners to have their kittens chipped by 20 weeks and adult cats chipped upon adoption from a shelter or rescue. Failure to microchip a pet would result in a warning and a three-week grace period. After that, cat owners would face a steep fine of £500, equal to $660 in USD.
Consolidating chip databases
There are about 10.8 million pet cats in the UK, although widespread chipping alone won’t solve the problem of pet thefts and lost pets flooding shelters. There are currently 16 different microchip databases in the UK. They don’t always share information and scans don’t cover each of the databases, so even if a cat is recovered, brought to a shelter and scanned, there’s no guarantee the kitty will be returned home.
The existence of so many non-cooperating databases operated by private companies “can pose a huge barrier to successful reunification of pets” said the British Veterinary Association’s Malcolm Morley.
UK authorities and the animal welfare groups pushing for the change are cognizant of the problem and want to streamline the 16 existing database into one central repository of cat microchip registration. That will take time and will have to include compromise on the part of the various private companies running the existing fractured databases.
“Every day, we see how important microchipping is for cats and for the people who love them,” said Pet Protection’s Jacqui Cuff, “whether it’s reuniting a lost cat with their owner, identifying an injured cat, or helping to ensure an owner can be informed in the sad event that their cat has been hit and killed by a car.”
A Postmates driver stole a customer’s cat while making a delivery.
Police are looking for help from the public as they try to identify a delivery driver who stole a Colorado family’s cat.
The woman is a driver for Postmates, an Uber-owned company that delivers food and other items from restaurants and shops that don’t offer their own delivery services.
Footage from a nearby surveillance camera shows the woman pulling up to the Adams County, Colorado home at 10:27 pm on March 9.
She delivers the package, then bends down and picks up the customer’s cat — an 11-month-old ginger tabby named Simba — before taking off in her white SUV.
Simba had a collar but was not microchipped, police say. Unfortunately, the suspect’s license plate number was not visible in the surveillance footage.
Unbelievably, Postmates hasn’t told detectives who the driver is. It wasn’t clear from a tersely-worded police statement whether the company has been uncooperative or it simply doesn’t have information on one of its own contractors. Neither potential explanation looks good for the company.
The Postmates app is also supposed to provide customers with basic information about their delivery drivers. It wasn’t clear why that information was apparently not available.
After police posted their plea for help identifying the alleged cat thief, several users warned of ongoing scams involving people who steal pets and demand ransom.
Simba’s case is also reminiscent of a late 2019 incident near Minneapolis in which a delivery driver stole a much-loved cat from a customer.
A doorbell camera caught the driver touching the cat and picking him up, but the angle obscured the view of the man actually stealing the cat. After months of denying to police and the cat’s owner that he stole the friendly feline, the driver finally confessed in a rambling letter to the cat’s devastated owner, admitting he tossed the cat out of his truck’s window shortly after stealing him. Because of weak animal protection laws that treat pets as property, the driver was charged only with a pair of minor misdemeanors.
In the case of the Postmates driver in Colorado, because they haven’t had any luck finding the driver, nor any identifying information from her employer, police are appealing to the public and hoping someone will recognize the woman.
They’ve released stills from the surveillance footage, as well as this description: “The woman is a Hispanic female with brown hair in a ponytail, a cloth face mask on, a gray long-sleeve shirt, black pants, and black shoes.”
Anyone with information about the woman or Simba’s whereabouts can reach police at 303-288-1535.
They’ve released stills from the surveillance footage, as well as this description: “The woman is a Hispanic female with brown hair in a ponytail, a cloth face mask on, a gray long-sleeve shirt, black pants, and black shoes.”
Pain In The Bud 