Purr-muda Triangle? Lanarkshire town’s missing cat mystery leaves locals puzzled

It may not be as glamorous a location as the Bermuda Triangle, but the mystery is every bit as puzzling.

Cats have been going missing from East Kilbride – and turning up ten miles away in a tight-knit trio of communities on the outskirts of Motherwell.

How and why the AWOL pets have ended up in Newarthill, Carfin and Holytown is anybody’s guess. But, at the last count, nine moggies have done so, leading to some tearful reunions and countless unanswered questions.

Now a support group has been set up to help others whose missing cats may well be on the other side of the Clyde. Pepe’s Friends is a Facebook page named after one of the feline victims, who is now safely back home.

The 12-year-old, who’s blind in one eye, was found in Newarthill 16 days after he vanished last month.

His owner, carer Tracy McCulloch, 50, said: “It’s 100 per cent not the cats taking themselves there. There’s something going on – we keep finding new cases.

“That’s nine since Christmas. When Pepe went missing, it was so out of character. We never imagined he might have left the area.

“It was a Facebook message from a woman in Newarthill that got us Pepe back. She’d seen him around so we went to the area, and when my daughter shook a box of biscuits, he came out from nowhere and recognised us. He was a bag of bones.

“But we started hearing of other cats from East Kilbride who’d ended up in exactly the same area. That’s why we started Pepe’s Friends, to try and help people find their pets. I think someone’s lifting them. One of the owners has been to the police but they said there is nothing they can do.”

Missing cat mystery

Mum-of-two Louise Thomson, 36, was reunited with family favourite Sox two weeks after he disappeared in February.

She said: “I’d lost all hope of ever seeing him again – but then I got a Facebook message from someone in Carfin who’d caught him raiding her bins.”

© Andrew Cawley

Louise told how daughters Cara, 16, and Amy, 15, burst into tears when they went to retrieve the pet.

She said: “There are rumours flying about of a delivery driver who’s been caught looking in bushes, saying he’s lost his cat.

“But if someone is stealing people’s pets, they need to be caught because I don’t think they realise just how special they are to families like ours.”

Linda Cuthbert, of cat rescue charity Clan McCat Scotland, said: “I have never, ever come across something like this. Cats like familiarity and have a territory they’re regimented in patrolling. They don’t just go for a 10-mile daunder.”