The unsettling rise of cat seducers: ‘My little companion was missing – and I was consumed with anger’
—
pajamakitten
The unsettling rise of cat seducers: ‘My little companion was missing – and I was consumed with anger’
—
pajamakitten
16 comments
Someone did this to one of our cats when I was eleven. She was missing for six weeks, so she must have been kept somewhere where she had access to food and water, we thought she was gone for good. She came back one morning at 6am, hungry but alive and in OK shape (mum took her to the vet that morning). We never found out who did it (this was long before the days of trackable collars) but I cannot say what I would do to someone if I found out they had our current cat hostage like that.
I happily stroke the neighbourhood cats and they are all really friendly but I could not imagine picking them up, let alone feeding them or letting them in my house. Some people have clearly lost all sense of boundaries if they think a wandering cat is theirs in any sense.
Surely there have always been rogue feeders and neighbourhood disputes about whose cat it is?
I mean this is the plot of Six Dinner Sid
We have a whole thing on reddit / tiktok / youtube about the “cat distribution system” telling people to take any friendly cat home with them because it “chose” them.
No buddy, some cats just like people and saying hello to them.
This isn’t anything new but have irked at some of the ‘cat distribution system’ content I have seen online which is people treating friendly outdoor cats as theirs to take.
If a cat is not on private property and it is unaccompanied by an owner, it is a stray. Stop letting cats roam. They have destroyed bird populations. I know this is how it’s always been, but appealing to tradition is a fallacy. I’m European too and my cats do not leave my yard. Edit: I’m not interested in arguing with people who think destroying bird species and letting cats get run over is perfectly fine. (Once the government gets round to banning roaming cats, the way the did in Australia, maybe we’ll talk again.)
Happened to us. Neighbours, three different ones, all took it upon themselves to try and seduce our cat away. The first was encouraging him into their house so their daughter could have him in her room. One day he scratched the kid, as he’s a cat, the neighbour came round to moan that the cat had done this. She got told to fuck right off.
The next neighbour said he was a godly person and that he could not just stand by and let our 6.5kg well fed cat starve, so he started to “cook up a bit of bacon” for him. Cat vanished for months when this started.
He moved, another family came and despite us telling them that the previous person was feeding our cat and not to feed him, fed him. In the end we caught him in a cat box and shipped him off to my wife’s parents, where he happily lives like a king now. 😖
This happened to a colleague. Her cat went missing and then they got a call years later, it was found in a street so they checked it’s microchip and returned her to them however she was well looked after in that time and later discovered it had been an elderly neighbour not far away who had taken her in all that time. My colleague got her cat back but I think she found it quite a traumatic experience at the time.
On the other side of that story someone told me the story of how they had got their cat years earlier. That it used to visit them and their son asked to keep him so they took him in. I asked did you not check for a microchip and whose it was and their response was oh I think it was just a stray.
I’ve never owned a cat just dogs but I think it’s so odd and cruel to just take another persons pet.
Unfortunately my mother is one of these.
She lost the old family dog last year and suddenly cats started appearing in the garden, she started feeding them, after taking it as a ‘sign’ to move on.
Two cats became regulars after a few weeks with a third becoming semi-regular.
She’s slightly more ethical about it though at least, the first two belonged to a neighbour nearby. They were moving soon and had 11 cats in their house as it was, they met for tea a few times and gave their blessing before they moved.
Just another reason you should keep your cats indoors really, unless you want some head-case nicking your cat anyway.
I blame social media for this. With people in the UK having more exposure to countries where it’s less common to let your cat out or you’re not allowed, some people assume cats outside are strays and if they come up to you, you can claim them. These people have clearly never had cats before because if they had, they’d understand that’s not how it works.
[They’ve always been unsettling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6ZDP8UhPys)
We had a pair of cats when I was around 8 and our neighbour’s daughter did keep calling one of them in, to the point my mum told them to just keep her, as after getting hit by a car, the cat kept trying to escape with a broken leg!
Mum didn’t mind as the daughter had some kind of intellectual disability so didn’t really understand plus having the cat seemed to help her.
Kitty sister stayed with us as me and her had firmly bonded as she ignored any seduction attempts as she loved us! Sasha, you were a brilliant cat! Xx
Unpopular opinion: cats shouldn’t be allowed to roam freely because they kill the native birds. 1 free roaming cat wouldn’t be a problem of course, but a full neighbourhood’s worth has a real impact in wildlife.
Also if you are happy to let your cat go roaming unsupervised, don’t be surprised if it gets run over, taken or gets lost.
We’ve got a super friendly cat who basically thinks he owns the street. A woman living nearby and her kid started feeding him. We put a bright collar on him that literally says “DO NOT FEED ME,” but she completely ignored it and kept letting him straight into her house.
He quickly figured out he could go over there for a second breakfast and wouldn’t come back for days at a time. We even resorted to slapping a tracker on him, but it didn’t really solve anything we’d still have to physically walk over, knock on her door, and wait for her to release him like a hostage.
The woman is completely mental and a total benefit scrounger, always living in her own alternate reality. For ages we tried to stay on her good side and keep the peace, but every time we spoke to her she’d just bullshit us with ridiculous excuses. Finally, I just wasn’t in the mood one day and gave her an absolute piece of my mind. It wasn’t polite, but honestly? It felt bloody good.
Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the issue, so we’ve had to make the hard call to turn him into a strictly indoor cat now. It has completely ruined his life he just stares longingly out the windows all day and meows histerically.
We tried to make up for it by building a nice catio area for him so he can get some fresh, which is decent, but it’s obviously not the same as roaming free. Plus, the sheer amount of cat litter we’re burning through now that he’s stuck inside 24/7 costs an absolute fortune.
Yeah it’s crazy. In my neighbourhood people are constantly posting clearly well nourished cats on our neighbourhood FB group and saying they think it’s a stray because they keep seeing it outside their building and feeding it (we’re in a suburb of London with very few cars). I think a lot of these people are from countries where indoor cats are the norm due to predators, and they just don’t understand that that just isn’t the culture here, and they start arguing when people tell them to stop feeding people’s cats.
One even went to the extent of leaving food directly outside a cat owner’s window every day til the owner put a camera there and worked out who it was. These people are crazy.
This is one of the reasons why my girl is a house cat. I would be beside myself if she got out and didn’t come back.
My MILs cat has gone missing twice in the last year, the first time we found him 4 miles away!
The second time he went missing he had bolted out of the door after a steroid injection and we’d searched everywhere we thought he’d be for 3 weeks to find him, but he was nowhere to be seen. We thought he’d been hit by a car or maybe even attacked by another animal and died, but still no sign of his body. Then one day it was around midnight and I was just about to put my phone down to go to sleep and I saw a post on Facebook asking if anyone knew who this cat belonged to, and it was him! I was positive, he has a very distinct face. So I commented saying this is my MILs cat, thanked her for looking after him as he had been unwell recently, and that we would make arrangements to collect him the next day. The woman started fighting me saying this couldn’t be my MILs cat because it was a girls. This went on for a while and she only relented after I started posting pictures of him on the thread and others replied saying it was definitely the same cat.
I totally get she wanted to establish ownership but it came off that she was trying to keep him at first, even though she posted looking for his owner.
There’s an easy solution to this problem, it’s called ‘keep your cat indoors’