Animal rights group asks court not to order culling of cats at SVDP 'cat café'

A voluntary organisation that had, up till recently, operated a “Cat Cafe” for elderly residents at the St Vincent De Paul care facility has asked a court to stop the rehoming or culling of the approximately 200 cats housed there.

This emerges from a warrant of prohibitory injunction filed last week by Animal Guardians Malta against SVDP’s new CEO Jorgen Souness, the Real Animal Rights Foundation, the Animal Welfare Directorate and the Commissioner for Animal Welfare, Alison Bezzina.

The injunction, which was filed by lawyer Yanika Barbara Sant on behalf of Animal Guardians Malta on January 4 and which was later provisionally upheld by the First Hall of the Civil Court, asked the court to prevent the defendants from “transferring, rehoming and/or euthanising” the organisation’s cats.

Not long after being appointed CEO last year, Souness is reported to have started looking into whether the conditions of a memorandum of understanding between SVDP and Animal Guardians that had expired in 2019, were being observed.

He told Lovin Malta that inspections he had ordered found multiple breaches of the MOU, claiming the cat population was four times the maximum agreed size and that the café was unsanitary, with dead cats buried in plastic bags on the facility’s grounds and other felines being seriously ill. The CEO had ordered Animal Guardians Malta to leave the facility in December.

Animal Guardians Malta is strenuously denying these allegations and has, together with the injunction application, filed a list of documents which it says, directly contradict the CEO’s claims.

The documents purport to show how thousands of euros were spent by the organisation, as well as others by its volunteers, to purchase food, medicines and veterinary services for the cats over a 7-year span.

The VO asked the court not to order the killing, adoption or eviction of any of the cats which the organisation had cared for on the SVDP grounds, and to allow it to access them, saying it feared that a number of the cats may have already been put to sleep.