Le Figaro Nice
Sordid and filthy things discovered in a house in La Roquette-sur-Siagne, a small town near Cannes, in the Alpes-Maritimes.
Around a hundred cat corpses were found buried under tiles (around fifty) and piled up in a freezer (around sixty) on Tuesday by the gendarmes and the association at the origin of the complaint, following a search.
Around forty felines were alive, wandering but all suffering from illnesses.
A sixty-year-old named Guy V. was arrested and taken into police custody.
The legal proceedings are now in the hands of the Grasse court.
It was a pestilential odor which alerted a neighbor, already aware of this individual's liabilities for facts dating back to 2018. He then made a report to a small structure called “animal protection investigators association” (AEPA) , which has only four permanent members and whose president, Nathalie Bassot, lives in Grasse.
As its name suggests, the association often conducts neighborhood surveys on reports of animal abuse, before filing a complaint if warranted.
That's what she did in this case.
For two months, two people carried out their own investigations to verify suspicions linked to difficult to bear odors in the neighborhood.
According to testimonies collected in the Riviera village of just under 5,500 inhabitants, Nathalie Bassot explains
“that he boasted of having 100 cats, that he even took some of them to pharmacies to have them treated”
.
On behalf of her association, she decided to file a complaint with the Pégomas gendarmerie in January for “animal mistreatment and neglect”.
An investigation was thus opened before this search and these atrocious discoveries.
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“Striking”
On site after the passage of the officers, accompanied by two agents from the departmental population protection directorate, Nathalie Bassot describes
“a house of horror”
.
“When you walk in there, it’s striking
,” she explains.
The smell of death and ammonia makes you cringe.
These are undignified conditions, all the furniture was covered in excrement.”
The man lived in a house of approximately 40m2 and also had two caravans in which he piled up belongings, reports the president of the AEPA.
The latter called on other animal protection associations to recover and care for the remaining cats, some of which were preparing to give birth very soon.
An online prize pool has also been launched.
What is even more disturbing is that Guy V. managed to name all his cats, even those who had died, says Nathalie Bassot.
“The most terrible thing is that he really seemed to love them
,” she adds, still moved by such a situation.
She decided to share some photos on her Facebook page.
On
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This case is reminiscent of December 2021. Another “house of horror” was discovered in Nice, also with around a hundred cats found dead in the home of a retiree.