As Christopher Snowdon recently pointed out, the past few governments have had a habit of passing laws that are either wildly ambitious or incredibly trivial, while neglecting the real problems Britain faces, such as the housing shortage, the productivity crisis and the eye-watering dysfunction of the NHS. An example of the former is the net-zero emissions law passed in 2019, as if the energy policy of a small island in the North Sea can affect the world’s climate. An example of the latter is a bill that will make it a criminal offence to get cats to follow you down the road. Believe it or not, this had its second reading in the House of Lords last week and will enter the statute books later this year.
Had the Pet Abduction Bill been passed 13 years ago, I myself could have been
sent to jail
I don’t doubt the good intentions of Anna Firth MP and Lord Black, the two sponsors of this private member’s bill. And to be fair, it doesn’t just criminalise efforts to abduct cats by, for instance, saying ‘Here, kitty, kitty, kitty’ as you walk backwards down the street. It also makes it an offence to steal a dog or a cat by removing it from its lawful owner. Nevertheless, it’s an example of what Snowdon calls a ‘petty prohibition’ and will end up exacerbating two of the bigger problems that successive governments have failed to address, namely, the ever-increasing workload of the courts and our overcrowded prisons.
Had the Pet Abduction Bill been passed 13 years ago, I myself could have been sent to jail. That’s when my six-month-old cat Trixie went missing. Now, it’s possible she was stolen and had this law been in place she wouldn’t have been – so there is that. But I think it’s more likely she went to live with a neighbour, was run over by a passing car or was chased into unfamiliar territory by an urban fox. It was this last possibility that I clung to and every evening I would set off with my three-year-old son Charlie, who was very fond of her, and comb the surrounding streets, crying out Trixie’s name. One of the things I remember about those nights is Charlie calling her name, too, his high-pitched voice echoing mine.
Then, one night, about two weeks after she’d disappeared, we found her. At least, I thought we had, and so did Charlie, who started jumping for joy. This was about half a mile away in a part of Acton known as Poet’s Corner. She was the same size and sex as Trixie, had an identical white patch under her chin and seemed to respond to her name. But the only way to be sure was to take her to the local vet where the microchip in her neck could be scanned. I’d got her from an animal shelter in Queen’s Park where she’d been chipped and when I registered her at Medivet Acton they scanned her and noted down the serial number. Unfortunately, the vet wouldn’t re-open until the following morning.
What to do? I couldn’t risk leaving her there, lest I never see her again. But on the other hand I didn’t want to catnap her in case she wasn’t Trixie. I decided to knock on half a dozen doors to see if anyone recognised the cat, partly in the hope of finding the family who were currently looking after her and who would tell me she’d suddenly appeared on their doorstep two weeks earlier. Although, had that happened, we might have had a tussle over who was entitled to keep her. Turned out, no one knew anything about her, although I dutifully left my phone number in each home in case one of the neighbours reported a cat missing the next day.
Having satisfied myself this wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, I then, in effect, walked backwards down the street, saying ‘Here, kitty, kitty, kitty’ and got her to follow us home. Once there, we coaxed her inside and shut the door behind us.
You can probably guess how this ends. Charlie and I took her to the vet in the morning where she was given a quick scan and declared to be… a completely different cat. Yikes! We drove straight back to Poet’s Corner and put her back where we’d found her. Or we tried to. By this point, she’d become quite attached to us – particularly Charlie – and didn’t want to be released into the wild. My last glimpse of her was in the rear-view mirror, sprinting to keep up as we sped off down the street.
Would this be an offence under the Pet Abduction Bill? I fear it would. In section 2, subsection (6)(a), it is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison to ‘cause or induce’ someone else’s cat to ‘accompany’ you. I had an excuse, but would it have been ‘reasonable’? Possibly not, particularly if said cat was never seen again. I just hope this new law isn’t enforced retrospectively.
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