Someone had tied a string tightly around the paw of a one-year-old cat, causing the paw to rot away.
A Cat Welfare Society volunteer found the cat last week at a void deck
at Block 450 Tampines Street 42.
Ms Lily Low, Volunteer at Cat Welfare Society, said: "I actually saw a raffia
string tied tightly around its front right paw, where one inch of his skin can
be seen and it was kind of smelly at that point of time. I could actually see
the raffia string eating into the flesh actually. His fore claws were gone and
two bones were portruding out from his paws."
The feline was rushed to a vet and had to be operated on.
Ironically, Raffia has been named after the very thing that caused it the most
pain and it will be walking with a limp for the rest of his life.
All the volunteers hope for now is that it will be able to find a good and
permanent home.
The Cat Welfare Society is offering $1,000 to anyone who can help bring the
abuser to justice.
Ms Dawn Kua, Operations Director at Cat Welfare Society, said: "We think that it
may have been that Raffia could have actually been tied to something and
actually bit through the string and managed to escape. So it sounds like the
person who tried to do this is not doing this just as an innocent prank."
This is not the first time the society is offering a reward to track down an
abuser, and it is not the worst case they have seen either.
Ms Kua added: "One of the recent cases that we saw was of this cat that had
actually been killed and its body was put in the Y junction of the tree, so that
when the volunteer came down, the first thing they saw was the cat's body. The
volunteer was a bit frightened, she thought it was targeted at her and was a
personal threat to her as well."
Anyone found guilty of abusing an animal can be fined up to $10,000 or jailed
for a year, or both.