Dear all, I am not an active user on Reddit so I apologize if I am doing this wrong. I do not want to give away too much detail in case it gets in the way of any investigations but I wanted some advice on how to approach this complicated situation.
There is a cat my family doesn't legally own but acts as its second family. The owner is quite aware of the arrangement and has no issues with it and we have been jointly looking after the cat with no issues whatsoever. The owner is frail but means well and there is no evidence of neglect.
For some reason, another neighbor who I'll nickname Karen, has this tendency to stir up trouble though we've not done anything to provoke her and what she did comes completely out of the blue. Karen lied to the owner and said that we stopped looking after the cat and suggested that she had another close friend, I'll nickname Kaprice, who was willing to look after the cat and even take ownership to help pay the cat's bills etc. At this point the owner believed Karen and seemed agreeable to the arrangement however she did NOT hand over any legal paperwork agreeing to the transfer of ownership.
A few days later we are taunted by Karen that the cat is never coming back to the neighborhood because it was sent to a shelter far away. We asked if the original owner gave them permission and they claimed yes, but when we spoke to the original owner, they said they did not consent to this arrangement and the cat wasn't even collected from them as all the paperwork was waiting to be signed by both parties. It turns out that Karen in fact lured the cat and trapped it before handing it over to Kaprice. Both Karen and Kaprice are refusing to disclose what shelter the cat was sent to.
Naturally we are distraught because the cat already had a healthy environment here and the way it was taken away was without consent from all parties involved. I realize as we are not the legal owners we are limited to what we can do but the original owner is now fully aware of the situation and would prefer that we took legal ownership of the cat after hearing what Karen has done.
Unfortunately he is not microchipped yet which I know is terrible, I've been pushing for this to be done but we never thought something like this would happen before we'd get to it. We do have evidence in photos and medical documents however.
We are going to get police involved but I want to know realistically what the best thing to do is to find this cat back because that is the most important thing to us. I'm also concerned that due to lockdown that this case won't be taken seriously and will be dismissed, but I still want to know the best way to trace this cat so we can get in touch with whomever has it so we can explain the situation.
I have cross posted this to legaladvice and catadvice and they have given useful advice. It's almost 5am here so we will call police very soon when it is around working hours. Cat was last seen 24 hours ago before we heard the news so I am skeptical of the re-home turnaround time. Just trying to post this to as many relevant subreddits as possible to try and get more ideas on what to do as we have never dealt with anything like this before 😢
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/kvkm7b/cat_stolen_by_neighbour_who_refuses_to_disclose/
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