Police in Ho Chi Minh City have arrested 12 men accused of stealing nearly 2,700 cats in night raids on residential neighborhoods and taking them away to be slaughtered for food. The men were arrested on allegations of property theft, and police said the suspects admitted stealing and trafficking approximately 2,700 cats of various types.
The arrests give a hard edge to a case that had been building for weeks. The suspects split into small groups, rode motorbikes through neighborhoods, and mainly worked between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., with each team estimated to have taken four to 10 cats a night. That pattern explains why the search for Ho Chi Minh City Cat Theft has spiked now: this was not a single theft, but a coordinated nighttime network.
Police and state media said the cats were taken to be slaughtered for food, and investigators confiscated fur removal machines, cat traps and measuring scales. In the July discovery that first exposed the network, police seized 50 live cats, 55 cat traps, two scales and two fur removal machines. The sequence of seizures suggests the operation was not only mobile but organized around collecting, holding and processing the animals before they were moved on.
That matters because the trade sits in a legal gray zone that still has rules attached to it. Consumption of dogs and cats is legal in Vietnam, but vendors are required to obtain certificates showing the origin of the animals. Media reports have said stolen cats can be sold at restaurants for at least 70,000 dong, or $2.70, per kilogram, which helps explain why the thefts could be profitable even as they were hidden in plain sight.
There is also a wider pattern behind the latest arrests. Police in Ho Chi Minh City arrested 18 people earlier this year in two separate cat-stealing rings, and in June they rescued more than 400 cats in a major bust of a cat meat crime ring in the city. At least 40 cats were reunited with their owners after that operation, while several others died because of the harsh conditions they were found in. Phuong Tham called the seizure of so many cats from one transport an overwhelming sight, and said thousands of cats every month are being stolen, trafficked and slaughtered for meat across the country.
The unanswered piece is not whether police found a network. They did. The question is how far the case now reaches, and whether the arrests can interrupt the wider trade before the next group of cats is taken from a neighborhood street in the dark.
