West Yorkshire – Pain In The Bud

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.

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.

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.

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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.