Cat-napping outcry after fur traders admit buying animals killed in Britain

The disappearance of hundreds of household cats has sparked calls for an official inquiry amid fears that they could have been killed, skinned and turned into blankets.

Concern has been fuelled by the existence of a legal Swiss trade in cat fur, which is reputed to be good for rheumatism. But cat blanket retailers have denounced allegations of widespread cat-napping across the border in France as absurd. They insist that they buy skins from wild felines killed in Switzerland and Britain.

Patricia Dolciani, head of the French Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA) in Thonon-les-Bains, in the Alps, has called on the gendar-merie to launch an investigation.



She says that her team has registered the disappearance of at least 550 cats in the region so far this year, more than double the number for the whole of 2006. “What really raised our suspicions was when people started ringing to say they had lost more than one cat. One person near Megève, for instance, lost three in a day.

“It’s quite possible to lose a cat, of course. They can get run over. But three in the same day in the same place in the same family is more suspicious.” The sense of panic gripping pet owners in the Alps was heightened when Marcelle Marchand, who has a refuge for wild cats, found one of her animals caught in a trap.

Sylviane Ghielmini, who sells cat blankets at her shop in Yvonand, in the Vaud district, told The Times: “I am totally mystified by these accusations. The cat fur trade is small and not very lucrative and I really can’t see why traffickers would want to get involved. I sell ten blankets a year and all to people in pain with rheumatism. When these allegations broke I phoned my wholesalers and they said they’d never heard of anyone trafficking cats between France and Switzerland.”