NEWS: Pet Cemetery III: Cats on Ice

CULTURE: Pet Cemetery III: Cats on Ice

A Tennessee man believes the police seizure of his 114 frozen cats entitles him to "emotional pain and suffering" compensation to the tune of $1.5 million. That's over $13K per popsicle-ed pet. William Davis, 75-years-old, is suing the Murfreesboro Police Department because he was holding the cats on ice for a special occasion: the grand opening of his pet cemetery

Police compounded the damage to Davis' emotions by robbing him of his one chance at immortality. He was holding on to the what he believed was a recording breaking cat whose size was so large at birth it warranted a call to the Guinness Book of World Records. He hadn't gotten around to making the call before police destroyed the dead, frozen cat's remains.

Bastards.

The seizure which occurred in December of 2003 resulted in several animal cruelty charges. Davis pled guilty to one.

Davis also bares a creepy resemblance to Santa.

Is it illegal to possess frozen dead cats?

I think it was more about the hoarding... as, according the rest of the linked article, he had the frozen critters "along with 46 cats, one dog, and assorted "wild game meat."" Meaning, it was probably questionable as to how the kitties made it into the freezer. Plus, I imagine you should need some kind of permit (undertaker? butcher? something...) to have that many dead anythings in your possession. I'm rather ignorant about that, though.

Considering the state of his home, what with the disturbing amount of animal doody, it's not crazy to assume that they are all just dead pets that died naturally. And it's not like he was hording them for no reason. He was planning on burying them.

I don't think the corpses should have been destroyed. I think they should have been buried properly, like the man planned.

Sure, he's crazy. But his heart was in the right place.

Oh good, this happens where *I* live.

Reminds me of high school. Why high school you ask? Well my biology teacher use to keep dead cats on the counters to be used for dissection. The real freaky thing about it, besides her keeping those dead cats out all the time, was the cats all looked really angry.

I wonder if he is related to the old lady down the road from me.... she has more than 300 cats (as of the last count by the local vet), Course none of them are frozen...

I agree, if he was actually doing the necessary things to make a pet cemetery and not just collecting cats in his freezer. Other than that, I'm thinking that all 114 cats were originally pets. That's a lot of cats to go through in one person's life and makes me think that he wasn't taking care of his pets properly.

Well the carpet of shit in his house would suggest that he probably isn't the most mentally stable person ever.

I think it's a situation where the cops sorta go "Well, I don't know what law he's breaking exactly, but there's gotta be something."

And then they wind up destroying this dudes already sad life for pretty much no reason.

This reminds me of a story from a friend. My friend had a cat that she and her young brother both loved, but it was a lazy cat. Often their dad would come home from work and see the cat lying there lazily on the tiled kitchen floor and nudge it with his foot, "Lazy cat!" and the cat would lazilly ignore him and return to laziness.

One day, as little girl and brother are sitting on the kitchen floor playing, Dad returns home and does as is the usual, nudges the cat, BUT! This time, the cat just sails across the tiles over to the wee ones, offering no resistance to his gentle poke. GASP! Mother and father realize the cat is dead, but rather than tell the wee ones the truth, they hide the fact and put kitty in the freezer.

Yes, in the freezer.

So, somehow, years pass. Maybe they forgot about it, maybe mom just never found the heart to tell the kids what had happened, but as all wee ones do, they got older, and of course realized what was up. Now, you know how these things go in the home, there's some horrid task that must be done but no one wants to be the one to do it, so it just gets left. And so kitty stays on ice for years and years.

Until one Thanksgiving.

Girl's Brother, now a strapping young man, and Brother's friend decide it's gone on too long. They pull kitty out of the freezer and take it outside. They dig a little hole in the backyard, which is no easy task, because our story takes place in the Midwest, and this time of year the ground is getting hard and cold. They toss kitty down and...

Kitty doesn't fit.

So what does Brother's friend do? He doesn't dig a bigger hole, no, that's too much work.

He snaps kitty in half, like King Solomon on crack, and tosses the not-so-symmetrical halves into the hole.

Deed done. Story over.

The article actually says the the man is being charged with animal cruelty because of the unsanitary condition of his home. I suspect the charge is due to the live cats (there were at least three) that the police took along with the frozen ones. Live cats which the police ended up killing, by the way. And though I'm not happy with that, I suspect that it's because the cats had been living in such horrendous conditions that the cats were diseased. So while I don't think that a plethora of frozen cats should warrant police interference just because it's strange, the police probably took the frozen cats because of sanitary regulations.

Where's Nixon when you need her?

Yeah, but it's not like he was doing it maliciously. he's just a wack job. And they seem to have no problem with him living there. Which is curious. It's fit for a person, but not for the cats?

Animal cruelty... the cats were dead before frozen, right? Or is the charges the state of the habitat? Riiiiigggghhhhtttt... we all know that cats don't lick their own asses or rut through garbage.


Bin Laden and FBI's most wanted are still roaming free but we have brought this man to justice and safely destroyed, PETA/EPA-approved, the cryogenic kitties


Can't wait to see this on Animal Planet.

Nah , he looks like Walter Cronkite .

I haven't even read the article yet and I'm giggling like a school girl. That picture and topline are priceless. I'll go read now.

I am disappointed. The title mislead me into hoping for a Stephen King version of a movie turned Disney On Ice, complete with vicious rotting animals.

I thought it was going to be an undead Broadway musical. On ice.

I know. I feel your pain