The mystery of a dead – headless – cat caused a stir for Fader Street residents this week.
Lou Struve was about to sit down for lunch on Thursday afternoon when his next door neighbour knocked on his door. The neighbour told Struve there was something dead in his backyard and asked if he would come check it out.
“He didn’t want to go near it,” Struve said.
So he went next door and sure enough, it was an animal – a black cat with white paws.
One thing stood out immediately, Struve said. The cat’s body was missing a head.
“That’s a little odd for me. I’ve seen some chewed up rodents and what not before, but nothing like this. It didn’t look as though there were bite marks on the body. The hind legs were there,” he described.
Struve told his neighbour to contact animal control while he went into the laneway to see if there were any “missing cat posters.” He didn’t find anything, but as he was walking back toward his home, he decided to stop by another neighbour’s place.
“I banged on the back door, he comes out, and I say, ‘You’re not missing a cat, are you?’”
He was.
Struve described the cat to his neighbour, who confirmed it was, in fact, his missing cat.
In the meantime, the neighbour whose yard the cat had ended up in had called animal control, but he told Struve they wouldn’t send anyone out because the cat was found on private property.
“I thought that’s a little odd,” he said.
“We have coyotes out here but not lately. … This cat didn’t look like it had any kind of animal or coyote or predator marks; it looked like his head was just missing.”
Struve went inside to call animal control himself, but again, he was told they couldn’t pick up the body unless it was moved to the edge of the private property.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t they be curious to come and look at this?’ What I looked at was a missing head. It was hard to tell whether it was severed; it looked like it had just twisted off,” Struve said.
By the time he went back outside, the body was gone and so were his neighbours. He assumes the owner finally came over to get his cat.
On Friday, animal control officer Margie Fox confirmed an officer stopped by the owner’s house to retrieve the body.
“He (the officer) believes the cat was killed by a predator – a coyote or a dog,” she told the Record. “He found that the body was torn, not cut.
“It is something we see, partial remains that get left behind by a predator for whatever reason. (Maybe) it gets disturbed by something so they leave it or they’ve had their fill and they don’t need anymore. So it didn’t look like anything suspicious.”
Fox added officers only come to collect remains of pets on private properties with permission from the homeowner.
“It’s one thing if it’s a wild animal or what have you, but he (the officer) just wanted to make sure he was not going to be going on to someone’s property that weren’t aware of it.”
