Cat kidnapper who's nabbed nine moggies

A support group has been set up for pet owners after nine cats went missing – only to then turn up again ten miles away.

Cats have been going missing from East Kilbride and turning up in a tight-knit trio of communities on the outskirts of Motherwell.

How and why the AWOL pets have ended up in Newarthill, Carfin and Holytown is anybody’s guess.

Now a support group has been set up to help others whose missing cats may well be on the other side of the Clyde.

Pepe’s Friends is a Facebook page named after one of the feline victims, who is now safely back home.

The 12-year-old, who is blind in one eye, was found in Newarthill 16 days after he vanished last month.

His owner, carer Tracy McCulloch, 50, said: ‘It’s 100 per cent not the cats taking themselves there.

‘There’s something going on – we keep finding new cases. That’s nine so far since Christmas.

‘When Pepe went missing, it was so out of character. We never imagined he might have left the area.

‘We put up messages all over social media, walked the local streets and knocked loads of doors.

‘It was a Facebook message from a woman in Newarthill that got us Pepe back.

‘She’d seen him around so we went to the area, and when my daughter shook a box of biscuits, he came out from nowhere and recognised us. He was a bag of bones. 

'But we started hearing of other cats from East Kilbride who’d ended up in exactly the same area.

‘That’s why we started Pepe’s Friends, to try and help people find their pets.

‘I think someone’s lifting them but I’ve no idea why.’

Mother-of-two Louise Thomson, 36, was reunited with family favourite Sox two weeks after he disappeared in February.

She said: ‘I had lost all hope of ever seeing him again – but then I got a Facebook message from someone in Carfin who had caught him raiding her bins.

‘We’ve absolutely no idea how he ended up over there. If only cats could talk.’

Ms Thomson told how daughters Cara, 16, and 15-year-old Amy burst into tears when they went to retrieve the pet they’d grown up with.

She said: ‘If someone is stealing people’s pets, they need to be caught quickly.’

Linda Cuthbert, of the Ayrshire-based cat rescue charity Clan McCat Scotland, said: ‘England will make it mandatory this summer for all cats to be microchipped with their owner’s details.

‘I hope the Scottish Government will follow suit so that owners and cats can be reunited more easily.’