Kitty Cornered

Are nine lives enough ?

A lawyer offered his services, a rock group threatened to clobber the prosecutors, and a cat promised to mount a demonstration. Not many prisoners are greeted by such a flood of sympathetic responses. But then few convicts serving life sentences are two years old; fewer still have four legs. Bubu is, in short, no common or garden-variety lawbreaker. A green-eyed tomcat, he was recently found guilty of trespassing on a neighbor's property in the Bavarian town of Passau and sentenced to confinement on his own side of the fence for life. In addition, the local court threatened Bubu's owners with a fine of up to $200,000 if their charge strays again. As hundreds protested, even the judge was moved to concede that "from the human perspective, this verdict is not fully satisfactory."

Although Bubu landed on his feet, many fellow felines have been less fortunate. Taking the law into their own hands, ailurophobes around West Germany have launched a campaign to kill more cats than curiosity itself. Some have shot the creatures with air pistols or flung them to the ground from sixth-floor balconies. Others have poisoned, strangled, axed or blinded cats. Their rationale: cats gobble up plants, scratch the paint off cars and even startle innocents by peering at them through windows. As a result, an estimated 300,000 cats, perhaps 10% of West Germany's feline population, were killed last year alone. According to Dr. Erwin Muermann of the Bonn Cat Protection Initiative, the present epidemic of cattiness may have its roots in a 15th century bull of Pope Innocent VIII. It declared that cats were possessed by the devil, says Muermann, and caused 100,000 women who owned cats to be burned at the stake--accompanied, of course, by their pets.

While some kitties have been tormented, up to 500 others each week have been abducted by teams of efficient criminals. Stealing up on their prey at break of dawn and using either tranquilizers or tantalizing goodies, the catnapers spirit the animals away to clinical experimenters, who require some 300 specimens each day. At $20 a cat, a resourceful thief can earn $50,000 a year.

Some cat lovers have tried to discourage torture and thievery by tattooing the ears of their cats. Yet some tattooed cats have already been found dead, with their ears cut off. Other concerned protectionists now advocate supervised spaying or simple incarceration of pets. But even with those precautions, many cats must wish they were leading a dog's life. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.