Thirty frozen cat corpses and forty others alive, but sick, were discovered Tuesday July 28 in the insanitary house of an elderly couple in Besançon, said the SPA and the police.
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A 91-year-old ailing woman and her 77-year-old husband lived in a " completely unsanitary " house littered with " animal and human excrement, hundreds of plastic bags and mounds of garbage outside ", Juliette Dupoux, commissioner of departmental security in Besançon, told AFP, confirming information from France Bleu Besançon.
The old lady was taken care of by the firefighters, she said. " In the freezers, more than thirty dead cats were found, " said the commissioner. According to the SPA, the names of the frozen cats were indicated on the bags containing the corpses.
"Catastrophic hygiene conditions"
The septuagenarian explained to the police that " as he did not know what to do with the dead cats, he froze them ". According to Sandra Majstorovic, head of abuse investigations at the Besançon Spa, “ this gentleman suffers from Noah's syndrome, a psychiatric illness characterized by the accumulation of animals ”. " These people are generally in denial, they think they are doing good while, because of the accumulation, they cannot take care of their animals " and " do not want to call for help because for them there is no 'there is no problem, ”she said.
Between 30 and 40 sick cats, some affected by mange, lived " in catastrophic hygienic conditions, like unfortunately the man and his wife ", underlined Mrs. Majstorovic. Undernourished, dehydrated, cats still alive " are not sterilized and proliferate ", according to her. The SPA, which intervened on Tuesday with a bailiff after several reports, announced that it would file a complaint for " mistreatment ".