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Feline Murderer Rampant in Sweden, 'Cat Mom' Killed in Korea

A troubling series of CATastrophes has plagued felines and their owners around the world this week.
Photo by Jovana Rikalo via Stocksy

This week, international cat-related chaos abounds.

A South Korean woman was killed last Thursday while attempting to build a shelter for stray cats. Authorities said that the 55-year-old "cat mom"—only otherwise identified by her last name, Park—died after she was accidentally hit by a cement brick.

At first, area residents and media were concerned that Park's killing was due to South Korea's much publicized hatred of feral cats. According to the Korea JoongAng Daily, Park and another member of an online cat lovers club were building a shelter for the neighborhood's stray cat population in the garden of Park's apartment building when the incident occurred. Park's companion sustained a skull fracture.

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[Koreans] think of [cats] as wicked and evil creatures.

In South Korea, feral cats have made many enemies. Soyoun Park, the founder and executive director of Coexistence of Animal Rights on Earth (CARE), has called Korea's disdain for felines "notorious." It's said that only one in 5,000 Koreans own a cat. In contrast, 29 percent of Americans keep cats as pets.

"[Koreans] think of [cats] as wicked and evil creatures. Perhaps their negative image comes from old Korean folktales where felines often portray the treacherous antagonists, thus leading to the mass population fearing cats. People would believe that cats would bring bad luck to their owners and so would rarely acknowledge them," she said in an interview on an animal activist blog.

Read More: Toward a Unified Theory of the Cat Man

In recent years, however, South Korea's attitude toward homeless cats has improved. As the Korea JoongAng Daily previously reported, the South Korean government has switched from extermination as a population control method to much more humane trap-neuter-return (TNR) programs. TNR volunteers, and animal lovers who feed stray cats, refer to themselves as "cat moms."

Officials in Seoul's Gangdong district have even set up a feeding station program to service the city's 250,000 stray cats.

"Nevertheless," the founder of CARE said, "the spike in people willing to help the abandoned cats has triggered an opposite spike in people who oppose this behavior, so it is still a highly controversial topic."

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That's why the police could not rule out the possibility that "cat mom" Park's death was a cat-related murder. Authorities administered a polygraph test to the 20 residents who were home at the time of the killing, but results turned out to be inconclusive.

Though, as was revealed this morning, the suspect turned out to be much less nefarious. The Korea Herald reports that a 9-year-old boy confessed to being the accidental perpetrator of the feline felony; he dropped the brick that killed Park from the roof of the 18-story apartment building as part of an experiment "on how gravity worked" that he was conducting with his friends.

Sweden's cat problem, however, remains unresolved. Germany's The Local reports that cat owners are currently living in fear as a kitten killer wreaks havoc upon the town of Skövde. In the past week, six pets were found dead, with the killer is still on the loose. While wolves have previously been found to be the cause of pet deaths in neighboring towns, reports suggest that the suspect responsible for these brutal cat deaths is human.

In the US, an alleged serial cat killer was just captured this week. At the California man's hearing, bereaved area cat owners filled the courtroom holding photos of their pets that were found dead.

"You know what, cats are just as human," one grieving owner told a local reporter. The alleged killer was found in his car with a dead cat.