It's bad enough when your cat disappears, but when a street-full of your cat's buddies also disappear at roughly the same time, there seems to be something downright evil going on.

Mile-End resident Jan Murray lost her cat on May 8, a two-year-old black and brown female with six toes who was apparently too timid to stray very far from home. In the days that followed, Murray checked every basement and shed on the street, asked neighbourhood children if they'd seen her cat, tacked up 50 signs, visited the Berger Blanc pound and the SPCA, and placed a classified ad offering a reward for her return.

SPCA, Berger Blanc in cat-fight over city contract The bad blood between Berger Blanc and the SPCA began in 1994, when the former took over the City of Montreal's animal control contract. The ill feeling is due to intensify soon with the publication of a damning SPCA report, which faults the Berger Blanc animal pound on a number of fronts, particularly animal euthanasia. Destroying 78 per cent of all animals received, Berger Blanc's euthanasia rate is nearly three times Toronto's (27 per cent), and more than double the SPCA's present 38-per- cent rate. Berger Blanc was awarded the city's animal control contract for the second time in a row last year. Until 1994, when Berger Blanc won its first three-year contract, the SPCA oversaw animal control in Montreal for five decades. Pierre Barnoti, executive director of the SPCA, showed the Mirror parts of the incriminating report. From the proportion of animals Berger Blanc manages to return to their owners (three per cent, compared to 49 per cent in Toronto) to adoption rates (12 per cent at Berger Blanc, 50 per cent in Toronto), Berger Blanc comes off as an organization whose concern for animals' lives is underwhelming. "Why would Montreal reassign another three-year contract to someone with such a poor performance?" asked Barnoti. Pierre Couture, president of Berger Blanc, says Barnoti's report is misleading: "We're not the same. We're there for animal control. Our mission is not the same as the SPCA's. Most people bring animals here specifically to be put to sleep." Couture adds that, as more people learn of its existence, Berger Blanc is euthanizing fewer animals every year. The SPCA also contends that awarding the city's contract to the SPCA instead of Berger Blanc in 1997 would have saved the city $2.2 million--the amount Berger Blanc had bid. The SPCA's competing bid at the time was a symbolic one dollar. Barnoti maintains the organization would have raised its money through the sale of $22 dog licenses door-to-door. François Lemay of the city of Montreal's contract-awarding department says he's "very satisfied" with Berger Blanc's record, and adds the SPCA's one-dollar contract bid in 1997 was "bullshit." "Why did they come up with a stupid offer like that? The city wouldn't have been able to accept a bid like that. We would have had to return the envelope. It's weird, and unacceptable legally." The SPCA's plans to license 86,000 dogs in Montreal were questionable, Lemay adds, because only 40,000 dogs now live on the island. Lemay says Berger Blanc's euthanasia rate is a concern, but says it's currently not much higher than the 71 per cent the SPCA maintained during the final year of its contract in 1993. Barnoti responds by saying the SPCA has managed to nearly halve that rate since then by setting up a foster family program whereby people can adopt a sick animal for three weeks--an animal that would have been automatically euthanized in the past. After the trial period, says Barnoti, 75 per cent of foster families become too attached to their animals to give them back. --Jacquie Charlton

By the following week, her efforts had all come to naught. Her cat had not returned and remains missing to this day. What made the whole thing worse, Murray says, was that shortly after her search began she noticed four other signs on telephone poles in nearby streets, each describing cats who'd gone missing at the same time.

Could it be a case of pet snatching?

According to the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, dealers who bring animals to animal-testing laboratories see Quebec as a ripe picking ground for test subjects, in part because of the abnormally large number of unwanted cats and dogs roaming the province's cities. House pets are also targetted because they tend to be more trusting, cooperative and forgiving in human hands.

Humane societies report eye-witness accounts of these dealers travelling streets and alleys in vans proffering meat or female animals in heat.

Berger Blanc and the SPCA have had experience with people who loiter outside their headquarters, offering to take the dogs and cats people are bringing in to a good home. The smart pet dealers, says SPCA executive director Pierre Barnoti, arrive with a woman and a child in tow to make the illusion of a pet-loving family more complete. Barnoti says the most recent buyers were sent packing from the SPCA's entrance roughly two months ago.

Berger Blanc president Pierre Couture says sometimes people come to the pound asking for five or six cats, claiming they're obtaining them for friends and family. They're promptly refused. A computer check is made on everyone seeking an animal, moreover, and repeat animal requesters are shown the door.

Berger Blanc's animal control contract with the city stipulates that it cannot sell any of its animals to laboratories, but other pounds are less scrupulous. In a CBC Newswatch report a few months ago, a middleman was shown purchasing dogs at the G.L. pound in Terrebonne and transporting them to Sacré-Coeur Hospital, where they were sold at a back door for research purposes--some with their owners' names still on their collars.

Sacré-Coeur officials said they were led to believe every dog was approved for lab use by its previous owner; G.L.'s owner said he didn't know the dogs were ending up in labs. And, strangely, nothing about the entire transaction was illegal.

"We see it happen, but we can't change anything," says Barnoti. "It's immoral, but it's not illegal." The SPCA is now lobbying the federal government to make it illegal for people to sell animals to labs.

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The source of animals used in laboratory tests is regulated in Canada. According to Marie Bédard of the Canadian Council for Animal Care, research institutions purchase animals from suppliers who breed specifically for lab purposes. She says the CCAC visits research institutions to assess the derivations of their animals, and admits they sometimes find pound animals in the labs. Bédard says the assessors strongly dissuade these labs from acquiring further pound animals.

The U.S. market is far more promising for people with cats and dogs to sell. Labs there acquire roughly half of their animals from so-called random sources, or Class B dealers. These Class B dealers are supposed to obtain animals from pet owners who willingly turn their animals over to the dealers, or from pounds or other Class B dealers. But according to the American Humane Society, the dealers will often falsify records in order to supply labs with kidnapped pets. Pets shipped from Canada are especially popular with the dealers because they don't require the same paperwork, and their owners have a much harder time tracing them.

According to the Humane Society, dealers will pay $10 to $35 U.S. for a dog or cat, and then sell it to a lab for anywhere between $100 and$500 U.S.

Organizations performing the research dismiss kidnapping allegations as fear-mongering by animal rights activists. A typical opinion was expressed in a recent press release by the Washington-based Foundation for Biomedical Research: "By creating the illusion that there is a demand for stolen pets, activists play upon fears of pet owners that their own pet could be stolen for such a purpose, thus generating opposition to animal research in general."

But study the whole question further and at a certain point you are confronted with a nagging truth: being a test subject in a laboratory is a horrible fate for any animal. Does it really matter if the animals are adored pets from loving homes, or dogs, cats, monkeys, and rats that have been "bred" for the purpose?

Listen to Jacques Godin's story and you wonder. This former member of the SPCA's board of directors was called in some years ago to remove some dogs, cats and monkeys from Ayerst laboratories when it moved some of its facilities to another building. Godin kept one of the dogs as a pet (he doesn't know if the dog had been once been someone's pet or came from a lab animal supplier). Godin euthanized it a year and a half after first taking it home, never having succeeded, after scrupulously gentle treatment, in persuading the dog to come when it was called, show any affection, stop hiding behind doors when people approached, or panicking in abject terror whenever it heard a metallic noise.