EXCITEDLY opening a video sent from an unknown number, Caroline Prater’s heart fluttered as she believed her beloved missing cat Morris had finally been found.
Within moments she was “completely destroyed” as the footage revealed her pet’s lifeless body, having been all but decapitated and subjected to hours of torture for the pleasure of a demented online cult.
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A shocking new investigation has discovered how thousands of sickos across the world – including Brits and children as young as ten – are sharing videos of cats being mutilated in vile online torture groups.
Chillingly, it is claimed the depraved international network is so prolific that an execution or torture video has been uploaded every 14 hours over the space of a year.
Among the most chilling discoveries were a three-month-old kitten allegedly impaled by children and another caged cat lowered to its death in boiling water.
And now, experts have warned The Sun of potential links between the abominable abuse ring and a famous cat torturer and killer, warning such attacks could even escalate to murder in extreme cases.
The sick snuff films are typically created by animal abusers in China, but increasingly police are investigating troubling links to the UK, too, after a spate of animal violence.
This week, two Londoners, 16 and 17, who can’t be named for legal reasons, were sentenced after cutting and stringing up cats in a grisly scene that involved knives, blowtorches and scissors.
Caroline, 55, from Cadbury Heath, Bristol, knows the trauma such attacks can cause all too well after the “absolutely horrific” videos of her 11-year-old therapy cat were posted to Snapchat for the ‘thrill’ of viewers.
She tells The Sun: “It’s so harrowing. Who in their right minds would do that to an innocent animal. What do they get out of doing it?
“What they did to Morris is still raw nearly six years on. I had to quit my job as an animal therapist because people kept asking where he was and what happened to him.
“It completely destroyed me. You never get over it, I visualise him screaming in my head.
“His head was hanging on by a piece of string. I had to go on tablets because I couldn’t cope.
“Torture is going around everywhere. Animals are being skinned alive on social media, why can that be shown? It’s horrendous.”
‘100 kill competitions’
Activists from the international charity Feline Guardians Without Borders went undercover to expose the horrors of the cat abuse rings.
Ghouls were found to be sharing vile videos for “thrills” and even receiving payment from other twisted acolytes.
Chillingly, UK-based members were found discussing how to adopt kittens from the RSPCA, with one monster posting a picture of an advert of cats for sale, saying they wanted to “torture them so bad”, according to the BBC.
Feline Guardians discovered 24 active groups this year alone, with the largest boasting more than 1,000 members. The most prolific user is said to have filmed 200 videos.
We never found Morris, we don’t know what happened to his body, all we found was blood and lots of fur stuck to the road
Caroline Prater
“I’m 10 years old and I like to torture cats,” the member of one of these twisted forums proclaimed.
Inside the groups, the discussions were described as “the depths of evil” by activist Lara, of Feline Guardians, who went undercover.
She found posts encouraging users to guess how long a cat could survive without food and others claimed they electrocuted animals to resuscitate them during torture sprees, prolonging their agony.
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Another self-proclaimed “cat-lover community” urged members to “submit your work” and some only allowed entry if they submitted evidence of them abusing pets.
One particularly twisted group held a ‘100 cat kill competition’ in September 2023 to see how quickly they could reach their target.
Netflix killer
The cases bear worrying similarities to videos filmed by Canadian Luka Magnotta, who was jailed for 25 years in 2014 for the murder of a Chinese lover.
After an investigation by The Sun, he was unmasked as the man behind videos online that depicted kittens being killed in chilling ways and was the focus of 2019 Netflix documentary Don’t F*** With Cats.
His crimes have since inspired ‘copycats’ including Scarlet Blake, who was jailed in the UK last year after live-streaming herself mutilating a cat just four months before the brutal murder of stranger Jorge Martin Carreno.
Teemu Saarenpää, 41, who runs true crime blog Forenseek, interviewed remorseless Magnotta after his conviction and fears these current killers are his “soulmates”.
“Someone does it first and that opens the doors for others. There may be an epidemic nature to this and unfortunately animal torture seems to be a fetish for those like Magnotta,” he tells The Sun.
“Whether Magnotta directly or indirectly influenced them is tough to say… but the longing to inflict pain on a living being may link them to Magnotta, they may be his ‘soulmates’ in that sense.”
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When Teemu interviewed Magnotta, he insisted he wasn’t an animal abuser, claiming he had been set-up or the videos were fake.
The killer’s motivation was fame, following failed stints as a model, and Teemu fears his acolytes may crave similar notoriety.
He tells us: “He was unreflective of his deeds and is clearly a wannabe celebrity who wanted to be famous and a glamorous god.
“Because he wasn’t able to obtain that fame through any real talent, he decided to become infamous instead.”
‘They tortured and killed him’
Pet lover Caroline is horrified by the rising popularity of the online cult, especially after the horrors her cat Morris was subjected to in September 2019.
Two days after he went missing, she watched the gut-wrenching videos and raced out to where the killing had been filmed – a road just a few doors from her home.
“We never found Morris, we don’t know what happened to his body,” she tells us. “All we found was blood and lots of fur stuck to the road, which I scraped off and still have to this day.
“Morris was absolutely wonderful, very loving, very friendly. He loved everybody. He was a therapy cat who helped children with cancer and adults with dementia.
“I had to give up my job, despite training for four years, because people would ask ‘Where’s Morris?’ I’m still hoping someone comes forward. They tortured and killed him. Someone must know something.”
There may be an epidemic nature to this and unfortunately animal torture seems to be a fetish for those like Magnotta
Teemu Saarenpää
No one has faced justice for the attack and Caroline, now a support worker, claims a further six cat decapitations happened in the area.
It’s not known whether Morris’s killing was linked to the groups in China, but she says it is evidence of an escalating trend of abusing animals for fun and sharing it online.
And PETA Vice President Mimi Bekhechi warns it’s not just cats that are at risk but humans, too – as those who abuse animals often escalate to killing people.
“Anyone capable of inflicting such violence on a vulnerable animal poses a danger to the whole community if they’re not urgently apprehended,” she told The Sun.
Johanna Baxter MP, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Cats, agrees that animal torture is often “a gateway, making future acts of violence easier to rationalise and commit”.
Lara, from Feline Guardians, also fears cat abuse rings “will only continue to expand and get worse” without an urgent crackdown from the Chinese government and law enforcement.
It was just an endless scroll of torture videos, one after the other… I felt, ‘I just can’t watch this’… I had to sort of turn off my brain
Undercover Feline Guardians activist
“In mainland China, there are no laws that are stopping this,” she told the BBC. “So that means that abusers and torturers can effectively do what they want and live out these very sadistic fantasies without any consequence.
“These videos are then uploaded, and essentially that’s a global problem, because that means that everyone has access to these videos. Children are seeing this.”
Since the torture cult’s links to the UK have been discovered, the RSPCA and other animal rights groups have called for a clampdown.
PETA’s Mimi added: “If anyone hears or knows of a person funding or recording animal torture videos in the UK, we urge you to report them to the police immediately.
“If you are someone buying such a video, you will be found out, and in this country, we will ensure you face the full force of the law.”
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