A heartbroken pet owner has spoken out after her elderly cat was found dying and covered in paint on an Inverness street.
Jemima Robinson’s 15-year-old pet Mitsi was so badly injured it had to be put down after being found in Craigton Avenue in South Kessock. Now she wants to see the perpetrator caught and jailed.
Inverness Cat Rescue was called out by council workers after the animal was found dying in a driveway in Carnac Crescent, just a few streets away from its home on Thursday.
The cat was taken to the vets, where she had to be put down.
Heather Swinton, director of Inverness Cat Rescue, said: “It is now in the hands of the SSPCA. They are investigating.
“The cat had paint from the tip of its nose right along its back to the tip of its tail. If it had pulled a tin of paint down on itself it would have had paint on its paws, which it didn’t.
“To me it looked as if the insides of its ears had been painted. It looked deliberate.
“Someone has done something to that cat. I am sure of it. It really is awful.
“There really wasn’t anything the vet could do for it.”
Mitsi had gone out for the evening on Wednesday and didn’t return home as it normally would have on Thursday morning with Ms Robinson’s other two cats, Buster and Peppa.
Ms Robinson said: “Whoever did this needs to be jailed.”
She learned about what had happened on the Inverness Cat Rescue Facebook page.
She said: “I phoned the vets and went in to see if it was her. I knew straight away that it was when I saw her.
“It looked like somebody had painted from her nose, along her head and back right to the tip of her tail and inside her ears with white paint.
It didn’t look like paint had fallen on her accidentally.
“Her lower eyelids right in the middle of each eye had two little slits on them as if they had been cut. The people at Inverness Cat Rescue didn’t know how that had happened, they wondered if she had been trying to get through metal bars or something.
“She had been with me for 15 years. She was such a sensitive cat. If I was ever in tears she was right there, she would come up and nibble my nose. She was so good. No cat deserves to die like that, especially not her. I want to know who did it. I want to know why anybody would do that.”
A post mortem is being carried out by the SSPCA.