The Mystery Of The Missing Cats, Dogs and Humans

Missing pets. Missing women. Missing children. When mass murder is alleged, our first question should be: Where are the remains?

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I can’t identify whether, culturally, Haitians can or have eaten dogs and cats—in Haiti anyway. Some cultures do chow down on chows! Like the Chinese. Even First Nations in Canada have eaten dogs—the Canadian author and Ojibwe playwright Drew Hayden Taylor has written about it. The early Jamestown settlers in Virginia ate dogs, too. In fact only they and the Native North Americans, as far as I know, ever did it here.

I have yet to find any documented evidence that immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, or any remaining colonists today eat pets in North America. Apart from a woman in Canton, Ohio, who was recently arrested for allegedly killing and eating a cat in front of others. But she wasn’t Haitian; she was American-born. She did however seem mentally disturbed.

I can’t promise pet-eating absolutely, never happens here—especially if it involves someone with mental illness. Or who was literally starving. Or who was a serial killer, with a penchant for animal cruelty.

But so far, zero evidence indicates immigrants—including Asians and Haitians—in ‘Murica are killing and eating people’s pets. I don’t care how many Ohioans claim otherwise on Eyewitness News. Because there’s something that really bothers me.

Where are the animal remains?

Springfield, Ohio should be littered with cat and dog skeletons by now if LieBoy and his couch-humping running mate can be believed. Has anyone checked the dumpsters? Looked for small, shallow graves? Has anyone’s dog brought inside half a hastily-buried cat it dug up somewhere?

Whether it’s cats, dogs, or humans, when mass murder is alleged, there have got to be remains somewhere. The evidence can exist for millennia. Look, we know the world’s oldest murder victim was over 400,000 years ago and Otzi Man was murdered 5,000 years ago.

I investigated three (in)famous mass murderers, accused of crimes so hideous they’ve been enshrined in the annals of true-crime history, which isn’t always as true as purported. I’ll keep the gory details to a minimum. Google them if you need nightmare material.

And also, now, in Canada, we’ve got our own mass mystery—the Hundreds of Buried Indigenous Children Who May Not Be. But first let’s visit some of history’s most notorious alleged sadistic killers.

Gilles de Rais

A French knight and lord and Joan of Arc’s companion-in-arms, De Rais was accused of torturing, molesting and murdering over 140 children, crimes he ‘confessed’ to under torture. The allegations were as horrendous as a fevered ecclesiastical imagination could, er, ‘coax’ out of him.

Countess Elizabeth Báthory

The Hungarian 16th-century countess was accused, with four of her servants, of hideously torturing, mutilating and murdering 600-650 women spanning two decades. Over 300 people at her trial described alleged physical evidence and claimed to have seen her horrifically mutilated and dying victims. Many testimonies, like in de Rais’s case, were obtained under torture.

Madame Delphine LaLaurie

The wealthy New Orleans slave owner allegedly got busted having performed Josef Mengele-style grisly medical experiments on her slaves, many of whom were allegedly found dead and several of whom were still alive, after a fire broke out in her mansion in 1834. The details of her alleged crimes are pretty hideous.

I began wondering if these horrendous stories were really true one night and Googled to find mention of remains. Where were de Rais’s 140 children? Where were Countess Bathory’s ex-playthings? Where was Madame LaLaurie’s Crab Girl?

When you start asking the hard questions, you find there’s not a lot of there there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.

Let’s start with Madame LaLaurie. Historians claim rumors about her extreme slave brutality had swirled around N’Awlins for years, but there are no recorded complaints or reports from the time. She was allegedly torturing and murdering her slaves above and beyond the call of slave-owning duty in nineteenth-century New Orleans, but the townspeople never noticed the stench of rotting bodies of the dead within, in that chronic heat?

Madame LaLaurie’s cruelties may have been real and sadly legal, but it’s unclear as to whether she was more brutal than customary. The tales of her alleged experiments, involving rent flesh and broken bones, grew more explicit in the decades and centuries after her death.

To be fair, whatever Madame’s neighbors found definitely shocked even them. The firefighters were so incensed, Madame LaLaurie barely escaped with her life from an enraged mob, and is believed to have died in France.

So there may be some truth to the allegations of an excessively cruel slave mistress, but not of her alleged experiments. I can’t find any modern-verified reports of her many alleged victims, including a slave girl who supposedly jumped to her death from the roof of the mansion when her mistress chased her across it to beat her with the brush. Or maybe it was a whip. No one seems quite sure. In particular, I’d like to know where Crab Girl is allegedly buried, as the damage done to her bones would confirm there was more going on than discipline.

Countess Báthory’s gory adventures also lack any evidence. Servants claimed in court they’d helped to bury victims but no one, to my knowledge, has found their graves. She was accused of horribly mutilating and murdering hundreds of women purely for sadistic pleasure. Where are they? None have been found in the castle as alleged. None in the church graveyards around the region. And who today can believe torture’s testimony?

The evidence at Bathory’s trial was all hearsay with no actual proof. And not a single corpse.

The allegations grew more lurid over the years, like a bit about her vampirically bathing in the blood of virgins, considered by modern historians to be B.S.

Why would her contemporaries lie about the horrible things they claimed to have witnessed? Would they have said them if they weren’t being tortured?

Speaking of politics, greed, and testimony obtained under torture, Gille de Rais’s considerable land and wealth was conveniently seized by greedy nobles. A mock trial of his alleged hideous crimes against children was held in France in 1992 and he was judged most likely innocent of these gravest of crimes.

Not a single child’s body has ever been found buried around or near what’s left of his castle to support his alleged murder of many dozens of children.

So pardon me if I doubt the word of hysterics in Springfield, Ohio and elsewhere we see on YouTube alleging witnessed pet-napping followed by din-din, with yet no proof apart from hearsay and highly questionable videos on social media.

People say a lot of stuff. Even when they’re not being tortured. Why are alleged journalists giving screen time to their ridiculous allegations rather than asking where the bones are buried?

Bodies, folks. I’m looking for bodies. Skeletons. Graves. Something we can point to and say, “Yes, this poor creature was tortured in the manner alleged of Mme. LaLaurie or this sick French bastard.” Or that Queenie wound up in the stew pot.

Which is why I’m skeptical of all those accounts of cats and dogs killed and eaten by immigrants. It’s a recycled century-and-a-half-old urban legend about Asians, who allegedly sometimes substitute cat or dog meat for chicken in their restaurants. The instances of the native-born alleging horrible pet-related crimes by immigrants are levied at every single last damn group, including Europeans. Immigrant anxiety causes adults to say the darndest things. There’s not a single documented incident of an Asian restaurant serving cat or dog to North Americans. Look, consult Snopes! And if you’ve got real proof of one, email Snopes!

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Scott Beale on Flickr

It all smells heavily of yet another Satanic-style moral panic.

The rule of evidence requires that those making a positive claim, “So-and-so murdered a kid,” or “My neighbor killed and ate a cat,” provide the evidence. Like, say, an actual murdered cat, as in the recent case in Canton, in which they have the remains along with the crazy lady in custody.

The conspiracy theorist who alleges pets are disappearing all over a small community needs to produce at least a few skeletons.

Meanwhile, up here in Canada…

The ‘missing’ and ‘buried’ Indigenous kids

We’ve got our own Canadian missing-corpses scandal unfolding over the previous scandal that no longer seems to have happened.

Some brief backstory. Canada, like the United States, wasn’t exactly kind to the original owners of the land. One very real thing that happened was the effort to ‘civilize’ the ‘Indians’, by forcing Indigenous children into residential schools for ‘proper’ white education. It was a joint effort by the government and Christian groups, and were, like anywhere else this ‘experiment’ was proffered, an abusive, traumatic failure for the victims. Children were isolated, prohibited from speaking their own languages, their heritages denigrated, and suffered physical and sexual abuse, etc. These schools operated for about a century.

In recent years, Native bands claimed mass ‘genocidal’ graves of children’s bodies were found near residential schools, most recently in Kamloops, British Columbia. Scandal ensued. Canadians, who care about, or at least pretend to care about, the victims living and dead of this black mark on our history, wrung their hands and demanded investigations.

Which was a good idea, except the Indigenous alleging the crimes of murdered or abused-to-death children hastily buried in a plot of earth somewhere keep getting in the way.

A Kamloops Native chief alleges 215 ‘missing’ Indigenous children have been found buried in a field near a former residential school. This is only the most recent of other allegations of mass graves. The ‘evidence’? Ground-penetrating radar (GPR), which surveys sub-surface ground for investigating underground utilities items like pipes, masonry, metals, cables, etc. It can also show that soil has been turned up, dug into, and replaced. One can’t know what’s actually there without investigation, which hasn’t been done on the Kamloops site because the local bands won’t allow it.

You’d think they’d be eager to damn existing Canadians with clear evidence that these alleged children were missing and murdered or simply allowed to die. But when some ‘denialists’ tried to excavate it to see if there really were remains, band members stopped them. Okay, these people were trespassing; but why doesn’t the band allow any further excavation? By anyone?

Long story short, a 2023 book called Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools) reveals that there’s no evidence for the ‘genocide’ of residential Indigenous children. The particularly damning piece of it is, once again, no actual bodies.

It’s fed a narrative preferred by some that Canada is hideously racist and genocidal against Natives. Canada certainly does have a documented racist history and has treated Natives quite poorly but—embarrassingly, for many Native bands, the charges of child genocide at residential schools are shaping up to be a massive hoax.

To cadge an idea from the new Matt Walsh mockumentary Am I Racist?, the demand for anti-Indigenous racism greatly exceeds the supply in Canada.

Nothing new under the sun

Mass MAGA hysteria may be suspected in the wake of Trump’s and Vance’s unverified lies, and of course they, too, have motivation: They want to win an election, and Trump is already a documented chronic, uncontrollable liar. As many critics point out when one is trying to suss out motivations, ‘Follow the money’. Who stands to benefit from this, and why?

Petrb, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Pet-eating is just another Republican Pizzagate.

If there really are bodies of Indigenous children scattered around Canadian land, let the band who ‘found’ them produce some remains. Otherwise, this is beginning to look an awful lot like the historical elites smeared by rumors, with not much else required for a conviction.

But anyway who cares, because the Trump/Vance team is soooo over Lassieburgers and Lasagna à la Garfield.

‘JEZEBEL’ HARRIS PRACTICES WITCHCRAFT!!!, don’tcha know??? Up next on Fox News!

When I’m not secretly Googling recipes for Manx Melange, Chihuahuacomole, Spaniel Spaetzel or Tomcat Tamales, I help women and others roast Rover reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.