Scores of our furry friends have disappeared across Ireland

An Irish pet shop owner fears we may have our very own ‘M25 cat killer’ because of the sheer number of missing moggies reported this year.

Emma O’Hare has been helping out at the family business – Pet Connection – since she was little more than a teenager.

The 23-year-old cat lover said the Co Down pet shop helps to rehome hundreds of kittens a year.

That, she said, was how she first began to realise there was a problem with cats going missing.

She continued: “One of the first cats that went missing was Bruce. He went missing on the August 28. He was owned by a good friend of the shop and he was originally rehomed through us.

“Then another cat that belonged to the same family, Dermot, went missing on September 2 so we sort of started to panic and thought there might be something going on here and that they haven’t just wandered.

“We put out a wee message on Facebook and asked had anybody else locally had a cat go missing and in that week, there was eight cats reported within a mile radius.

“It seemed there was a huge problem in that particular area.

“We kept spreading the message wider and wider and now we are up to 230 cats as of this evening (Monday). But that spreads all across Ireland.”

As for why the number of missing cats along the M1 from Belfast to Dublin is a concern, she said: “There’s a problem in England at the moment known as the ‘M25 cat killer’ – this person has killed 250 cats and foxes in the past couple of years.

“When we compare our map to the map of animals going missing in England, that person is also following main roads.”

When suggested that maybe the cats were being injured or killed on the roads, but she added: “You would be expecting bodies.

“We have been out on the roads with owners and there is nothing there.

“Some cats will have just wondered by themselves – but 189 cats in a year just haven’t walked off.”

What’s also concerning the animal lover is that many of the animals being reported missing are often referred to as their friendliest cat by owners.

“Each of these cats have been real family pets and everybody that has had multiple cats in the house and one has been taken has said that it was their friendliest cat,” she added.

“That’s worrying because it means somebody is lifting them because they are easy to lift. We would even be concerned that they are being lifted to train dogs or for badger baiting.

“In local areas where they have gone missing, we started asking owners to check really carefully for traps or dead wildlife that would suggest poisoning but there’s been nothing found.”

Emma also said that the vast majority (80%) of cats reported missing to Pet Connection were neutered and “well looked after”, meaning they really had no reason to wander.

Now she is calling on anyone who has lost their moggy in the last year to add the details to their database so they “can get a standard measure of how many cats tend to go missing each month” to give them more of a baseline to work off.