Curiosity didn’t kill this cat — but did the Butcher of Prospect Park?
Park regulars made a bloody pre-Valentine’s Day discovery on Sunday: a frozen, mutilated feline on the southern shore of the lake.
Advocate Ed Bahlman was taking a jaunt with wildlife rehabilitator Anne-Katrin Titze when the pair noticed a mysterious black garbage bag.
Instinctively, Bahlman touched the sack.
“I knew there was an animal inside immediately,” he said.
The pair, best known for their swan advocacy, opened the mystery bag, revealing the putrescent pussy.
“This was definitely the work of an animal abuser,” said Bahlman, who said the creature was not intact.
“Its ear was missing,” Titze noted. “No animal could have done that.”
The bagged cat could be the calling card of the shadowy fiend we call the Butcher of Prospect Park, the malevolent person or people with a taste for animal blood who burst on the scene last March.
Chicken heads, a dead dog, a raccoon have all turned up by the lake since then, not to mention goat guts, and later, the caprine’s head.
Eugene Patron, a park spokesman said the cat appeared to be a case of “illegal dumping,” and said that workers would remove the bag once they locate it.
“People are bringing those animals to the park,” said Patron. “It’s not like people are going around killing and harming wildlife in the park.”
(Except the feds, of course, who killed more than 250 geese in the name of aviation safety last year.)
Advocates and park officials agree that the cat in the bag is not likely the work of follower of Santeria, a religion that uses animals in ritual sacrifice, whose practitioners are also known to leave behind gory traces of their faith.
Either way, animal lovers were appalled.
“Where is the empathy for living, sentient beings?” wondered Sheepshead Bay resident Laurie Bleier, founder of the Brooklyn Animal Foster Network.
