Shelley father pleas for cat owner awareness after daughter finds two birds dead

A SHELLEY father has pleaded for more awareness from cat owners after his daughter’s two birds were killed.

When 18-year-old Claudia Zilm noticed her cockatiel Freay was missing from her cage in the backyard, she searched for the bird and made the gruesome discovery of a single wing, ripped from the bird’s body, on the nearby pavement.

Just a week later, she discovered her baby cockatiel Teddy was missing when she went to bring him inside the house at night and found his wing lodged in between two paving slabs nearby.

Her father Damien Zilm said his daughter was distraught and had dedicated a significant amount of time to raising them.

“We lost one of the adult birds and then lost one of the baby birds that she’d hand-reared and put a lot of effort into because they didn’t want to feed initially,” he said.

“We were playing YouTube videos to try and get them to feed by hearing other birds feed to have them respond; she put a lot of effort into that and hand-rearing them.

“They had their own personalities, the two birds bonded really well together and with her as well.”

Mr Zilm said the cat was eventually caught, but the damage had already been done.

“It was a beautiful, small slim cat, it had a bell. I imagine the owners thought ‘my beautiful cat wouldn’t do any harm, it’s got a bell, I’m doing the right thing’, but it was negligent of them to leave it to roam.”

“The girls were worried about the welfare of the cat, they didn’t want any harm to come to it and that it just went back to its owners with the an appropriate warning of ‘your cat has caused a horrible event to occur’.

“She’ll have that for the rest of her life, which could have been avoided by making certain cats are appropriately kept inside at night.”