A Blackball man is heartbroken at the suspected poisoning of his cat -- and angry someone in the township may be targeting other pets.
Daaron Curtain and his wife Raewyn are trying to come to terms with the loss of nine-year-old Blue, which they had raised from a kitten. It is one of a number of cats in Blackball that have disappeared in recent weeks.
"He would only come to me and my wife ... I am disabled, he was extremely comforting," Mr Curtain said.
He was worried when Blue disappeared for a few days. "Then he came back, he wasn't right, he was a bit nutty -- he was very emaciated and dehydrated. He wouldn't eat, I knew he was really sick."
He took the cat to West Coast Vets in Greymouth, but they released it, saying it was just dehydrated.
"But we took him back again, I wasn't happy with his behaviour," Mr Curtain said.
On the second visit to the vet, at his request, Blue was force-fed but still did not improve. When the vet told him the cat was going to die, he took Blue home. However, the vet first took a blood test, which confirmed it had been poisoned.
The vet did not say what the poison was, but Mr Curtain thought it was anti-freeze.
Mr Curtain said he knew of at least three other people in Blackball who had their cats die in the past few weeks, one of which suffered the same "wobbly leg" symptoms as Blue.
He said he had a "pretty good idea" of who had been poisoning the town cats, but had not yet gone to the police because he did not have a "burden of proof".
Another Blackball resident Craig Stevenson said his female tabby cat The Stig had not been seen for two weeks.
"Coming home from work, she's always on the picnic table at the back of the house. She has been poisoned by the sound of it ... there's a few in Blackball that would do that, Daaron's wife said it was anti-freeze in their system.
"I have had a good look around, had a good look in lots of places. People know my cat, but no one has seen her around, so something's happened."
Anne Christie, said her cat Poppy Stray disappeared six weeks ago. It had reappeared one day when she got home after a fishing trip, but by the time she had gone into the house the cat had gone again.
"She was an inside cat most of the time, she didn't really venture much outside. I started looking for her and I couldn't find her anywhere," Mrs Christie said.
She was not sure exactly what fate had befallen her cat.
"I can't say that my cat was poisoned. I never would have thought of poison when I saw her. I thought maybe she had been clipped by a car, or even someone had kicked her hard.
"But after listening to Daaron, to what happened to his cat, I thought that was what might have been happening with mine."
After six weeks she had accepted that her cat was not going to come back, but she would rather the cat had died at home with her, "where I can find her".
- Ben Aulakh of the Greymouth Star
