Cecil and Carol de Klerk are cat lovers and feed about 28 cats daily.
Having a few cats of their own they believe their pets must have attracted feral cats to their house in Edelweiss.
According to Carol the cats know they will not be chased away.
“They are not a nuisance and we feed them all, although it cost us an arm and a leg,” she says.
To Cecil these cats are like family.
He says they will rather go short themselves than seeing an animal go hungry.
However, their love and care for these cats has had them in tears over the past two weeks.
This comes after they found the first dead cat on January 21.
Since then they have found six more dead cats in and around the property.
Carol says she was astounded to find two dead cats on January 23.
Then last Monday they found three dead cats again.
They took one of these cats to a nearby vet for a post mortem.
“We can’t help but suspect someone is poisoning our cats,” she says.
The vet informed the de Klerks he found the cat’s stomach full of food and can’t confirm it had been poisoned, but will send the stomach, its contents and a piece of the kidney to Onderstepoort in Pretoria for further tests.
Just as Carol thought it was the end of the trauma, they found their pet cat Ginger dead last Tuesday.
When the Addie visited the family, they were heart broken.
“We don’t know who is doing this to us, but we wish they would rather come talk to us if the cats are a nuisance to them, rather than killing them,” says Cecil.
The family reported the incidents to the Springs police last Wednesday.
The test results from Onderstepoort confirmed the cats were poisoned with two step.
