Hong Kong police arrest man allegedly caught lacing cat food with rat poison

Police have arrested a 34-year-old man on suspicion of animal cruelty after animal welfare volunteers caught him lacing bowls of food left out for stray cats with rat poison.

In a Saturday statement, police said that a report was received at around 3.37am that day alleging that the man, surnamed Ho, had spiked bowls of cat food with poison.

Surveillance footage recorded using cameras set up by the volunteers caught him in the act and went viral on social media, along with videos of the volunteers later confronting him.

The police brief stated that officers who arrived on the scene found a packet of rat bait and a 14 cm fruit knife on the suspect and arrested him on suspicion of animal cruelty and possession of an offensive weapon.

Ho was detained for further investigation, with his case taken over by the Sham Shui Po police district’s crime unit. No cats were harmed in the case, the police statement said.

‘Please do not harm them’

In the viral video of volunteers confronting Ho, he denied trying to harm the cats and said that he only wanted to deter the strays from eating the food to keep the area clean. The volunteers responded that the poisoned cats would only die in public areas, causing more hygiene issues.

Ho can be seen in the video wearing a running vest with a patch bearing the Wolfsangel or “wolf’s hook” insignia – a symbol that originated in medieval German heraldry and was later adopted widely in Nazi symbolism.

One of the animal welfare groups that intercepted the 34-year-old, Hong Kong Suspected Animal Abuse Report (HKSAAR), said on Threads that it had been monitoring Ho for more than a month.

HKSAAR released photos of the poisoned cat food as far back as June, when it was first uncovered by another volunteer group it had been working with. The photos showed a thick black paste covering pieces of dry kibble, as well as blue granules of suspected rat bait in bowls of water.

Under Hong Kong law, the maximum penalty for animal cruelty is a HK$200,000 fine and three years’ imprisonment.

One of the volunteers, Nicholas Sum, said in a post on Sunday: “You don’t have to love them, but please do not harm them.”

“After lying in wait for an entire month, we finally caught him,” Sum said. “Huge thanks to all the cat rescue volunteers, local neighbours, and HKSAAR for pulling multiple all-nighters in a row to track [the suspect] down.”

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James Lee is a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press with an interest in culture and social issues. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Journalism from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he witnessed the institution’s transformation over the course of the 2019 extradition bill protests and after the passing of the Beijing-imposed security law.

Since joining HKFP in 2023, he has covered local politics, the city’s housing crisis, as well as landmark court cases including the 47 democrats national security trial. He was previously a reporter at The Standard where he interviewed pro-establishment heavyweights and extensively covered the Covid-19 pandemic and Hong Kong’s political overhauls under the national security law.