Man, machine or beast
September 24, 2018 3:29 AM   Subscribe

Police have called off the three year investigation into the 'Croyden Cat Killer' as they believe they now know the answer. But some locals are not happy and want the hunt to continue (Video possibly nsfw, other links have potentially disturbing descriptions)
posted by fearfulsymmetry (35 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm not sure it's right to say "some locals". Although named the Croydon Cat Killer initially, and then M25, the deaths in question are quite non-local.

As SNARL note however, they don't seem to be completely non-local, with some areas getting no such deaths at all, which is one of the reasons people want investigations to continue.
posted by edd at 4:14 AM on September 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sounds like Randy Lenz is on the prowl
posted by mit5urugi at 4:15 AM on September 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


SNARL's Facebook page has further statements, comments, and links to a vet who has seen some of the bodies and disagrees with the accident+fox conclusion, a disturbing report on one event where the animal owner doesn't buy it, and one of a report (also disturbing) of strange claims around one rabbit's death.
posted by edd at 4:20 AM on September 24, 2018


As a local, I'm in two minds about it. On the one hand we do have a very large (and vocal) (and stinky) fox population so I can easily imagine them taking advantage of injured or accidentally killed animals. We had a family of them living in our garden this summer and the four cubs frequently caused absolute mayhem tearing through everything as they were growing.

On the other hand, the Met police are so massively underfunded and overstaffed (with 999 calls going unanswered in some cases recently) that I wouldn't blame them for wanting to hand off a difficult and fairly low impact case off to the easiest possible explanation. Croydon is a very poor borough with a lot of problems. Until the government addresses the mishandling of police budgets, unfortunately people's pets going missing isn't going to be top priority.
posted by fight or flight at 4:21 AM on September 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


(Obligatory fox tax, taken a few months ago. She and her mate like to come up to our back door and press their noses against the glass to peer in. Once she tried stealing one of my shoes from just inside. Not exactly the best neighbours, but they are entertaining.)
posted by fight or flight at 4:28 AM on September 24, 2018 [10 favorites]


I have some cat loving friends in Croydon, so I've been following this for some time.
FWIW I've been fairly sure it's foxes and cars since day one.

Suffice to say my Croydon cat friends do not agree (I have resolved to avoid discussing it with them as far as possible).
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:59 AM on September 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


I live not far from Croydon and there are plenty of foxes. One day as I was sitting at the old PC, very likely reading Mefi, I felt a little pressure on my left foot, which I thought was strangely like a cat standing on it. I looked down, and there was a fox looking up at me innocently.
posted by Segundus at 5:17 AM on September 24, 2018 [21 favorites]


I do feel for people who lose pets to anything, but I don't know how you can live in an area where cats are being killed in numbers large enough that people notice like this--regardless of whether they're being killed by people, other animals, or anything else--and not go, "You know, this indoor cat thing, I'm going to have a look at that." I grew up having outdoor cats; it's not like I'm just culturally unfamiliar with the practice. I don't have outdoor cats anymore, because I couldn't deal with the outdoor cats that didn't come home.
posted by Sequence at 5:52 AM on September 24, 2018 [12 favorites]


We live downtown and until recently there was a pigeon colony that roosted on top of the office building near us. Last year, from our kitchen window, we witnessed a Cooper's hawk hunt and attack the pigeons. This past year it's become more of a sustained campaigned, and over the past two or three months we would discover a decapitated pigeon (here's a somewhat graphic image) on our driveway almost every day.

The feathers from the kill float around and get scattered up and down an entire city block.
posted by JamesBay at 6:20 AM on September 24, 2018


I don't believe the fox explanation.

Anecdata:
I live in Croydon, in the road next to where the first suspicious deaths were recorded. Until a few months ago I had two old cats (who both died of illness rather than violence). My wife & I were concerned for our cats as the news began to leak out that cats were being killed in the streets around our house and, eventually on our road itself.

The alley beside my house makes my garden a cut-through for foxes and other cats, so my garden is busy with foxes and cats every day. Not a day goes by when I don't see multiple cats and foxes in my garden. They largely ignore one another, even occasionally sleeping on my shed roof only a few feet from one another. The few times they face off, its always when one has surprised the other by coming around a corner unexpectedly, and they always end up with the surprised cat/fox running off. I'm well aware that foxes do occasionally attack cats but haven't seen it happen in the populations of both locally.

I don't buy the fox story because, given my location, the are literally blaming the very foxes I've watched every day for several years living alongside cats without mutilating them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not fond of the foxes, due to their propensity to poop everywhere, but I struggle to imagine them carrying out the precise mutilations and weirdly ritualised victim displays described, and then carrying on living alongside other cats without batting an eyelid.
posted by faceplantingcheetah at 6:23 AM on September 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


Really hope this doesn't end up with a local oddball getting strung up / windows bricked / house burned down. Whole business is starting to creep toward having the feel of that.
posted by ominous_paws at 6:59 AM on September 24, 2018 [6 favorites]


400 cats in 4 years ? I totally buy the fox story.
posted by Pendragon at 7:10 AM on September 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


I don't buy the fox story because, given my location, the are literally blaming the very foxes I've watched every day for several years living alongside cats without mutilating them.

Well, it's not the living cats that the foxes are interested in. As is, I've seen cats pretty neatly eviscerate other animals (and leave a pile of guts on my doorstep - THANKS FOR THE GIFT).

I do feel for people who lose pets to anything, but I don't know how you can live in an area where cats are being killed in numbers large enough that people notice like this--regardless of whether they're being killed by people, other animals, or anything else--and not go, "You know, this indoor cat thing, I'm going to have a look at that."

This a million times over. My family only lost one cat, ever. It was a cat that was allowed to go outside. The remaining eight cats spread across my immediate family members have either died peacefully from old age or live happily to this very day.
posted by Atreides at 7:17 AM on September 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


I have to say I'm excited to discover fellow Croydonite Mefites! We'll have to do a meetup and discuss where we all stand on the "are we in London or are we in Surrey" issue.
posted by fight or flight at 7:25 AM on September 24, 2018 [6 favorites]


SNARL claim they have indicators that this is a person, and they haven't revealed all of the indicators they have. There's hints of it in one of my articles above with a 'trade mark' being cut in. But what that is exactly is never made clear.

Without knowing all the details I struggle to rule out the cars+foxes explanation. You hear things that just don't make sense for a fox, but they're not terribly well documented for the public either which doesn't help.

I'm left pretty much unable to make a solid conclusion.
posted by edd at 7:27 AM on September 24, 2018


The problem with this story is that it's been really badly reported (and/or people aren't reading beyond the photos, headlines and twitter blurbs)

The police aren't saying that the foxes are killing cats - they are saying that foxes and other scavengers are mutilating already dead cats.

But the responses to this are overshadowed by people insisting (fairly) that foxes don't kill cats, or (less fairly) that they've always known foxes are vermin/kill babies/whatver.

And that is an amazing derailment, which, of course, means we don't talk about the real problem, which is that cars seem to be killing a LOT of cats in Croydon (and elsewhere). But we're not great at talking about how dangerous cars are...
posted by AFII at 7:32 AM on September 24, 2018 [6 favorites]


I'm excited to discover fellow Croydonite Mefites

We can do Box Park one evening and totally solve the cat killer thing.
posted by Segundus at 8:02 AM on September 24, 2018


For each of the cats reportedly killed by the suspect in the past three years, almost 1,500 died on the roadside, according to a calculation based on a 2006 estimate of vehicle-related cat deaths.

Sounds like they have a larger crisis that needs addressing: the socially-accepted practice in England of allowing one's cat(s) to roam outdoors.
posted by Lunaloon at 8:43 AM on September 24, 2018 [6 favorites]


Too, also: this is incredibly reminiscent of the cattle mutilation hysteria of the 1970s, when, thanks to social contagion and over-zealous local police and veterinarians, ranchers began suddenly noticing damage to cow carcasses and erroneously concluding two things:

1. That the number of dead cattle found in pasture/rangelands was steeply rising (it wasn't).
2. That the injuries/marks on the carcasses were not the result of (natural) predation (they were).

Thanks to the social contagion, spread primarily by a single cop found to have been exaggerating and embellishing details, followed by UFOdumb adopting the issue and claiming it as UFO-related and/or part of a secret government project, what was actually typical cattle deaths with postmortem predation turned into a massive conspiracy theory.
posted by Lunaloon at 9:12 AM on September 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


They need to set up a team of roaming cats fitted with surveillance devices to catch the culprits.
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:28 AM on September 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


Sounds like they have a larger crisis that needs addressing: the socially-accepted practice in England of allowing one's cat(s) to roam outdoors.

The problem with that is figuring out who actually owns the roaming outdoor cats particularly since the cats and ostensible owners will likely disagree.
posted by srboisvert at 11:16 AM on September 24, 2018


Are cats native to England? Cursory googling just keeps returning Big cats myth stuff. I'm all for keeping cats indoors here in Aus where they're vermin, but is that a concern in England?

I tend to think it's nicer to the cats to give them freedom to roam if it's not a threat to local wildlife.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 11:50 AM on September 24, 2018


freedom to roam

Freedom to die under the wheels of a car, freedom to get killed by a coyote, freedom to get shot by psycho teenagers with B.B. guns, freedom to be picked up by animal control thinking it’s yet another stray and euthanized, freedom to catch terrible tick and flea borne diseases...
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 12:17 PM on September 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


Are cats native to England?

Not really. There's the Scottish wildcat which is very much endangered, so there is a cat-shaped niche available I guess, but domestic cats breeding with Scottish wildcats is actually part of the reason they are endangered so still not great.

I do feel it's nicer to let cats outside, but I sort of feel that the ideal solution is actually some sort of backyard the cat can't get out of, not to let them roam randomly and get hit by cars and eat hedgerow birds. When we finally move from a flat to a house, my plan is an enclosed catio.

(Our current two cats are indoor cats, but they love looking out an open window and it does make me feel a little bad for them. On the other hand we got them at age 9 having always been indoor cats, and also they're dumb as rocks and won't hang out anywhere but the room we are in.)
posted by stillnocturnal at 12:17 PM on September 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


I hope they'll next turn those resources to figuring out who killed the 2.6 million cattle slaughtered in the UK last year.
posted by 256 at 12:54 PM on September 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


Slight derail but our lad has a small catio but also gets let out with us on a lead. Our fellow Brits are often baffled at the sight but he enjoys that, is always safe, and the wildlife is safe from him too. (It helps we have a lot of quiet pedestrianised space for such activities, I wouldn't walk a cat anywhere they didn't have plenty of choice to decide where to go themselves)
posted by edd at 12:56 PM on September 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


Are cats native to England?

No, but they've been around so long that they don't have the kind of wildlife impact that they do in Aus. That is: they do kill wildlife but not in a way that seems to have an impact on UK species populations overall. (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds on this.)

I'm not expecting to win over mainly US Mefites to the idea that cats should be let outside not least because again, different place, different wildlife context. But it's really striking just how wide the cultural divide is on this, especially with stories like this one that get international attention. Like I have seen puzzled theorising elsewhere on the internet that UK people must not really think of cats as pets, because why would you let them out to roam around at will if you actually wanted a pet? Whereas here the prevailing attitude is much more that cats are happier when they get to go outside, such that lots of rescues will only rehome most cats with you if they will have free-range outdoor access.

The rescue I got my cats from was like that: if you didn't agree to let cats out during the day (but only during the day), or if you lived near a busy road or a railway line, you were only eligible for the small number of adult cats that had lived all their lives as indoor cats already. And these are rescues that are very very keen to find homes for cats. It is not an "oh who the hell cares if they die" attitude, but a genuine belief that despite the risks cats will on the whole live happier lives if they can go out and will be much more likely to develop behavioural problems if they can't. Think of it more as a difference in philosophies like the free-range parenting vs. children should not be allowed out independently until they're grown debate.
posted by Catseye at 1:58 PM on September 24, 2018 [8 favorites]


That's not true for the entirety of England. I lived in London for a few years and my friends there had indoor-only cats.
posted by asteria at 2:04 PM on September 24, 2018


I live a few neighbourhoods away and whilst I don't have any stake in the cat-killer discussion, I had a family of foxes living in my garden. One time I left my bag outside overnight and when I came back it was torn up, had a dead bird inside it and a shit on top of it. Foxes are the worst.
posted by Ned G at 2:05 PM on September 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yes, people in inner cities are a lot more likely to have indoor-only cats (or not have cats at all - I didn't get any until I lived somewhere that wasn't a city). But you will still see a lot of cats roaming around even in busy city residential areas.
posted by Catseye at 2:07 PM on September 24, 2018


I had the same experience with rescues, actually, outdoor cats had to stay outdoor cats because anything else was seen as cruel, even in a city rescue. I see plenty of cats walking about Edinburgh, although not fully city centre. I think those tenements with a back garden enclosed by buildings would be the best cat option - free but contained.

Personally, I've known too many cats hit by cars, and I'd only get an outdoor cat in a truly rural area. Adopting adult indoor only cats works for me right now, but honestly I do feel guilty about their quality of life. I don't even know where I'd walk them because the green area that used to be next door is getting turned into an Aldi.
posted by stillnocturnal at 2:15 PM on September 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


We have quiet roads but it’s still more traffic than I’m comfortable with. Ideally I’d like to have mine restricted to the back garden, but there is no feasible way to fix up all the boundaries in a cat-proof way at the moment. I was happiest with the cat I had many years ago who liked to go outside but only so he could sit in the windowboxes staring into the house.
posted by Catseye at 2:54 PM on September 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


We've had seven cats over the last 20 years and the process we adopted was a cat flap that allows them to come and go, making sure they were neutered / spayed (not much desire to wander and no real interest in fighting), not allowing them access to the front of the house (we're a terrace so in our case it's easy not to let them out into the road at the front) and most importantly getting them in when we come home in the evening and locking the flap until the next morning. This avoids dusk and dawn when visibility is poorer and hunting more prevalent and obviously we know where they are at night. Most of the time, the cats would be / are either in the house of their own choice or in our back garden.

The only evidence of predation we have ever seen was a series of dead rats of various sizes and in various stages of togetherness (most memorably a pair of front teeth, a nose and a set of whiskers and nothing else; second most memorably a complete and live version that promptly hid behind a bookcase and which I had to pick up with a stout pair of gardening gloves and pop out of the nearest ground floor window). That was courtesy of the late great Prudence, tiny tabby terror and scourge of ratkind. Given the evidence to date, I'd like to think the birds were mostly ignored in favour of the easier, ground-based prey.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 3:42 PM on September 24, 2018


The indoor vs outdoor cat thing, the leash no leash dog thing....good luck.
posted by Pembquist at 9:20 AM on September 25, 2018


Another story covering continuing disputes over what's been happening (Daily Mail).
posted by edd at 4:49 AM on September 29, 2018


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