The disappearance of hundreds of household cats has sparked calls for an official inquiry amid fears that they could have been killed, skinned and turned into blankets.
Concern has been fuelled by the existence of a legal Swiss trade in cat fur, which is reputed to be good for rheumatism. But cat blanket retailers have denounced allegations of widespread cat-napping across the border in France as absurd. They insist that they buy skins from wild felines killed in Switzerland and Britain.
Patricia Dolciani, head of the French Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA) in Thonon-les-Bains, in the Alps, has called on the gendar-merie to launch an investigation.