An animal charity has rescued a cat after it was put up for sale on a popular clothes website.
A seller had advertised the three-year-old pet for £30 on Vinted – only for it to be bought by the founder of a rescue charity.
Abi Left, who runs Left Paw Cat Rescue, said the seller didn’t carry out any checks before handing the cat over to her, the charity founder having not disclosed she was from a rescue centre.
Vinted is an online marketplace for buying and selling second hand clothes and accessories.
The Lithuanian platform said the cat sale had violated its rules, adding it had removed the listing as soon as it became aware of it, the BBC reported.
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A statement from the company said the website ‘is not a place for the sale of animals, as stated in our Catalogue Rules’.
It said that members were able to report inappropriate listings and added that it used software to detect the sale of banned items on the site.
However Ms Left denied the incident was a first and that the seller told her they had seen nothing wrong with listing the cat online, while admitting that people had ‘had a go at her’ for doing so.
The charity owner said the low price tag for the cat demonstrated the owner had put ‘no value on his life’.
The cat has now been taken to a foster home.
Ms Left said that it was taking time for the cat to adapt to its new home, saying it had been ‘scared’ when collected from the seller’s house and was hiding from its new owners.
But she added: ‘At least he’s safe, we know he’s in the right hands and hasn’t accidentally ended up in the wrong hands.’
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