U.S. Agency to Probe Mystery Cat Deaths

A federal agency will investigate whether dozens of county cats were killed and mutilated over the last few months by people instead of coyotes, as county officials recently concluded.

The Animal Damage Control Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture will reportedly send a representative from Sacramento as soon as possible to look into the killings, which have all occurred in North Tustin and nearby communities.

County animal control officials had been investigating the killings for months and blamed coyotes searching for food.

But North Tustin cat owner Janet Hampson, who has been conducting her own investigation, contends that the killings have come at the hands of people. She said someone with a knife has been cutting up the animal body parts and collecting the blood, perhaps to use in some kind of satanic ritual.

Hampson received permission from animal control to bring some of the cats from recent killings to private veterinarians, who concluded that not all deaths were due to coyotes or other predators.

Veterinarian K.G. Kali said that three of the 20 cats he examined over the past three weeks appeared to have been killed by people. Necropsies on the other cats were inconclusive because their bodies were too mutilated, Kali said.

Cuts on the bodies of the three cats were clean, indicating that they had been caused by an object such as a knife, hatchet or ax, he said.

He said there were no signs of bite marks or trauma to indicate that an animal had killed the cat or that it had been hit by a vehicle.

“I have never seen where they are cleanly cut like these three are,” Kali said. “They were very cleanly cut.”