Who's to blame for 196 million dead birds: Your killer cat

Stouffville, Ontario, is a kind of bedroom community of Toronto. A relatively short drive from point A to point B. It's an historic farming community. A place where a week-end flea market took place and residents of Toronto would drive over to see what was on offer. Like pigeons? fanciers sell them there. And baskets of fresh-picked apples, pears, corn. Baked goods, too. Or you can pick up some really excellent framed prints, or oil paintings. Even a set of kitchen pots and pans, stainless steel, at a really good price. Pottery, and dinnerware. Jams, jellies.

At least you could, when we lived there forty years ago. In Toronto, that is. We'd visit Stouffvile, with our young children in tow, driving up to Stouffville, making our lean household budget go just a little farther, and being right royally entertained at the same time. Because you'd never know what you might find there, the following week; always surprises, quite delightful. Toronto has expanded exponentially since that time. Now, there's kind of a mysterious and troubling situation being experienced in Stouffville lately, according to the latest news.

York Regional Police, responsible for patrolling the region north of Toronto, have released information relating to a one-month period where locals have discovered severed cat heads in public places. Six of them. No signs of blood, no damage to the heads. Police don't believe this is the result of predatory animals. No one has sighted the related bodies, just the heads. Last winter we came across the precise opposite, close to where we now live. A grey squirrel frozen fast on a winter trail in the woods, as though arrested in mid-scurry, tail erect, front paws and back in the act of forward-motion.

Only, it was a very chilling, sinister tableau. No blood in evidence there, either. The squirrel -- and it could have been one that we'd seen often before, since it's an area we daily use for recreational purposes, leaving peanuts for the squirrels to help them survive the long cold winters -- was in perfect shape, other than that it was missing its head. It was a grisly, upsetting scene, and we wondered whether a raccoon might have been responsible. Living in Toronto years ago and keeping pigeons, we'd seen how raccoons did just that with the pigeons, reaching into the coop to pull the bird's head toward them.

But in Stouffville, they don't believe this is what has been happening. "What's of great concern to us is the pattern of it. Six incidents all similar in nature; that's what's alarming to us", said Const. Pattenden in the company of Ontario SPCA officer Brad Dewer. "It's absolutely atrocious, a human being who does that", said a local resident, Connie Sima, owner of a few cats herself. "My daughter texted me and said 'You'd better go put your cats in the house", she said. "I don't know where they came from [the cat killers] but I wish they would leave."

"They say you start with the wings of a fly", says Peter Archibald, living close to where two cat heads were discovered. "Then ants, then mice, and then cats, and what's next?" He was expressing a fear of some residents, who feel whoever has done this may not confine his predations to cats. Six cats roamed his area a year ago, he said, now only one is left. "All the songbirds are back ... blue jays and cardinals and mourning doves. And there are lots more squirrels again."

Bingo.