Brazenly Abducted from His Home in Broad Daylight by an Auto Parts Delivery Man and Then Allegedly Dumped, Dot Is Nowhere to Be Found Almost Four Months after the Fact

Dot Lived Contentedly with Heidi Dalbec for Almost a Decade

"He was really a special little guy, very friendly and outgoing. The kind of cat who loved car rides, which is rare. So I was always so careful with him."
-- Heidi Dalbec

Given that tens of millions of cats are mercilessly slaughtered each year simply because they do not have responsible owners to care for them, it at first thought seems rather odd that anyone would go to the trouble of stealing one as opposed to adopting from either a shelter or the street. Even so, the theft of cats is not all that rare and when it does occur it usually ends tragically for both the victims and their distraught owners.

Sadly, that harsh reality has been foisted upon Heidi Dalbec of tiny Watertown, forty-nine kilometers west of Minneapolis, with an unstinting severity. Her heartbreak began innocuously enough on October 10th when she unwittingly ordered some supplies to be delivered to her home by a local auto parts purveyor.

After the delivery man, twenty-three-year-old Byron Thomas Vieau of Rockford, twenty kilometers north of Watertown, had departed she noticed that her beloved twelve-year-old longhaired tuxedo Dot was nowhere to be found. Luckily, she had equipped her residence on the 2600 block of County Road 127 with a surveillance camera that not only captures still images but live video and audio as well. It was thus while reviewing the footage that she saw and heard Dot come meowing up to Vieau.

The delivery man then bent down and stroked him before the pair disappeared out of range of the camera. Regrettably, it has not been disclosed if Vieau had made previous deliveries to Dalbec but since she owns and operates HD Landscaping there is a good chance that from time to time she is in need of replacement parts for some of the equipment that she improvises in her occupation.

It accordingly is entirely conceivable that Vieau not only already knew Dot but that he had had his eye on him for some time. Regardless of whether or not that was indeed the case, the footage was sufficient in itself in order to convince her that he had driven away with Dot in his large, unmarked white van.

Although it has not been disclosed either when Vieau stole Dot or how much time had elapsed before Dalbec got around to reviewing the surveillance tape, at 2:32 p.m. that same day she promptly notified the Carver County Sheriff's Office (CCSO) in Chaska, thirty-three kilometers southeast of Watertown; the city itself does not have a police force. "The owner of the cat reported a delivery driver that was at her residence appeared to take an interest in the cat," a spokesperson for the CCSO later told KDUZ Radio of Hutchinson, forty-eight kilometers west of Watertown, on January 3rd. (See "Rockford Man Charged for Allegedly Stealing Cat.") "The reporting party looked for the cat after the driver left and was unable to locate the cat."

What transpired next never has been explained but if prior cases of this sort are any gauge the CCSO did absolutely nothing and that it turn sealed Dot's fate. What it and, by extension, any responsible and halfway legitimate law enforcement agency should have done is an entirely different matter.

First of all, Vieau should have been taken into custody and relentlessly interrogated until he confessed to what he had done with Dot. That is unquestionably what the CCSO would have done if he had abducted either a child or an adult.

Secondly, search warrants should have been immediately issued for his van, workplace, and residence. Thirdly, a forensic team should have been dispatched in order to have gone over him, his van, workplace, and residence for the presence of Dot's fur and DNA which then could have been matched up against residual amounts of the same that he had left behind in his bed, at his feeding station, and elsewhere inside Dalbec's residence.

Fourthly, he should have been placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance because he could have stashed Dot almost anywhere. As a delivery man, he not only knows the area but is able to come and go almost anywhere that he chooses without attracting the least bit of suspicion and that in turn provides him with a large latitude in which to operate.

Moreover, that is likely how that the extremely clever Thurston County Cat Killer operates. (See Cat Defender post of November 23, 2018 entitled "The Thurston County Cat Killer Is Allowed to Get Away with Stealing and Carving Up at Least Fourteen Cats Thanks to the Blasé Attitude and Ineptitude of the Law Enforcement Community.")

Fifthly, the CCSO could have employed bloodhounds in order to have located Dot. In the unlikely event that it does not have dogs of its own, a professional animal tracker, such as Pure Gold Pet Trackers (PGPT) of Berryville, Virginia, could have been called in to have done the job.

Sixthly, once the search had been narrowed down to a manageable area, thermal imaging could have been employed. It was precisely it and the efforts of PGPT that ultimately led to the retrieval on December 6th of a three-year-old German cat named Milo that Luftansa Airlines had lost earlier on October 3rd at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington. (See The Washington Post, December 11, 2019, "Milo the Cat Went Missing at the Airport in October. Two Months Later, He's Been Reunited with His Owner.")

Unable from all accounts to have gotten so much as the time of day out of the CCSO, Dalbec was cruelly and shamefully left to go it alone. "I knew in my gut what had happened to Dot, but at that time I just couldn't prove it," she helplessly conceded in an undated posting on Facebook.

It is nothing short of appalling that the no-good, bone-lazy rotters at the CCSO left her and Dot hung out to dry. Much more importantly, private citizens should never be abandoned to track down and confront on their own cat thieves and killers if for no other reason than that some of these perpetrators also could be homicidal maniacs.

Nevertheless, that is the dilemma faced by cat owners all over the world. For instance, Scotland Yard refuses to investigate cases of cruelty to cats even when their aggrieved and courageous owners, such as Amy Jo Bland of the West Ham section of East London, are willing to do its work for it. (See Cat Defender post of December 18, 2018 entitled "The Brutal Attackers of Mr. Solly Walk in a Lark All Because the Rotters at Scotland Yard Were Too Bone-Lazy, Derelict, and Ailurophobic to Even Examine the Evidence Supplied Them by His Distraught Owner.")

Left without any other recourse Dalbec, like Bland before her, was forced into taking matters into her own hands. "I realized almost right away what had happened, tracked down the individual and confronted him," she continued in the Facebook posting cited supra. "He lied saying he did not take my cat."

Not believing him for one moment, she elected to have another go at him. "I approached him again, pleading with him to just give my cat back and I will drop the entire thing, but he lied again," she concluded.

Having now exhausted all the arrows in her quiver, Dalbec did the only thing that she could and that was to retain the services of an unidentified private dick who on December 11th was finally able to coax a handwritten confession out of Vieau. As if Dalbec did not already know his identity, he oddly enough began his rambling mea culpa by declaring, "My name is Byron..."

Vieau Is Caught on Camera Luring Away Dot from Home

After that he went on to admit that he had "unfortunately made a poor judgment decision to take your cat." He next nonsensically declared himself to be "a huge animal lover" who only "wanted to have a pet of my own."

Notwithstanding those declarations, Vieau's professed love for Dot turned out to have lasted about as long as an ice cream cone left in the sun on a hot day in July. "I did make an impulse choice right outside Watertown to let the cat go," he continued. "I started feeling awful and quickly shoved the cat out of my car. I do not know where it went after that."

Whereas cruelly stealing someone's cat is bad enough in its own right, to dump one is even worse. Furthermore, such callous and totally inexcusable behavior proves conclusively that he is anything but a cat-lover.

Unless he was perhaps rehearsing an insanity defense, his summation proved to be the ne plus ultra in reductio ad absurdum logic. "I never wanted to be a bad guy, just wanted to give it a home." C'est-à-dire, like all criminals he does not have any qualms about stealing and dumping a cat; it is only getting caught that troubles him.

The trail has long grown cold by now but if he had specified exactly where he had dumped Dot it still might be remotely possible to track him down. The strong suspicion, however, is that even the shamus was unable to coerce him into revealing that valuable piece of information. Even more disheartening, "outside of Watertown" could mean almost anywhere.

For whatever it is worth, he insists that he "never hurt it" and hopes that "they can find it where (he) dropped it off." Whereas it is not known how much that Dalbec paid the gumshoe, it is difficult to see how that Vieau's belated confession brings her any closer to locating Dot; in reality, it amounts to little more than she already had fathomed beforehand.

Her money accordingly might have been better spent having the peeper follow Vieau in the hope that such an undertaking would eventually have led him to Dot's whereabouts. Even more puzzling is his decision to finally come clean after having denied stealing Dot for a full two months.

On December 19th, Dalbec posted the surveillance video of Vieau stealing Dot on her Facebook page. As to why that she had held off in doing so for so long, it is assumed that up until that juncture she still retained some glimmer of hope that she could convince him into voluntarily returning Dot.

Even so it was not until January 2nd that Sheriff Jason Kamerud finally got around to charging Vieau with one count of misdemeanor animal theft and one count of misdemeanor animal abandonment. He remains at large, however, and presumably on his own recognizance. (See Carver County Sheriff's Office, Press Release of January 2, 2020, "Theft-Animal Abandonment.")

Considering that Vieau had confessed in writing to the gumshoe on December 11th, it is inexplicable that it took the CCSO a little more than three weeks in order to arrest him. In fact, he should have been arrested on October 10th based solely upon the surveillance tape and Dalbec's testimony.

It certainly appears that the CCSO not only never wanted any part of this matter from the outset but also that it went out of its way in order to stiff Dalbec at every turn. If that is true, it certainly would be more than a little interesting to know what finally prompted it to get off the schneid and to act.

Regrettably, Vieau's belated arrest contributed absolutely nothing toward putting an end to the shabby treatment that Dalbec had received so far. The only thing that changed was that the local capitalistic media now replaced the CCSO in ignoring her plight and, much more importantly, that of her beloved cat as well.

For example, it was not until January 3rd that they picked up the story of Dot's abduction and that was the first inkling that the outside world had that either he or his owner even so much as existed. Even in doing that much, the media contented themselves with merely rewriting the CCSO's press release of a day earlier.

The sole exception to that iron rule of indifference was WCCO-TV of Minneapolis which on January 3rd not only posted the surveillance video on its web site but actually dispatched one of its reporters to Watertown in order to interview Dalbec. (See " 'I Never Meant to Be a Bad Guy': Delivery Driver Confesses to Stealing Cat.")

Following that initial effort even it has dropped the story like a hot potato. The outside world thus has been left to surmise that Dot is still missing.

As for Vieau, he was scheduled to have been arraigned January 27th before Judge Janet L. Barke Cain in First Judicial District Court in Chaska. Based upon his December 11th written confession, he was expected to have pled guilty to both of the charges lodged against him but he could have changed his mind once again and entered an altogether different plea.

Even once his case finally comes to trial it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that the presiding judge will let him off with a minuscule fine and perhaps court costs. He therefore will be allowed to carry the secret of Dot's demise to his grave and there will be little, if anything, that Dalbec can do about it.

The only fly in his ointment is the petit fait that a Mary Dalbec is the court administrator for the First Judicial District and it is just possible that she is related to Dalbec. Even if that should prove to be the case, it is uncertain if she is in any position to do anything positive for either Dot or Dalbec.

Attempting to fathom what courses through a gourd as twisted as Vieau's is at best only guesswork. Nevertheless, such an effort needs to be made.

First of all, although he is an admitted liar it is nonetheless entirely possible that he is telling the truth about dumping Dot. If that should be true, it is difficult to imagine how that the elderly cat that Dalbec adopted, presumably from a shelter, almost a decade ago would be able to survive on his own, especially if he has been cruelly declawed.

Sheriff Jason Kamerud Did Absolutely Nothing to Locate Dot

Besides the monumental difficulties associated with procuring food, water, and shelter, Minnesota is a perilous environment for any footloose cat. Not only would he have to contend with both human and animal predators in an unfamiliar landscape, but his biggest menace would be motorists.

In that light, it can only be hoped that Vieau did not dump him in traffic as was done to the Chattanooga kitten and to so many other cats and kittens as well every day of the week. (See Cat Defender post of July 16, 2010 entitled "Tossed Out the Window of a Car Like an Empty Beer Can, an Injured Chattanooga Kitten Is Left to Die after at Least Two Veterinarians Refused to Treat It.")

Nevertheless, stealing and then dumping cats is a rather common occurrence. For example, on December 4, 2016 an unidentified man and woman abducted a ginger-colored tom named Mr. Cheeky from outside the residence of his owners, Ollie Wilson and Laura King, in Hove, East Sussex.

Even though his theft had been captured in black and white on a neighbor's surveillance camera, nothing further was either seen or heard of him until he was run down and killed by a hit-and-run motorist on January 28, 2017. (See Cat Defender post of February 8, 2017 entitled "The Long and Hopelessly Frustrating Search for the Kidnapped Mr. Cheeky Ends Tragically Underneath the Wheels of a Hit-and-Run Motorist.")

Although there is not anything in the public record to even remotely suggest that Vieau is an amateur ornithologist, stealing and dumping cats at remote locales is a favorite tactic of those cat-hating devils and their professional counterparts. Moreover, their victims often suffer the same fate as Mr. Cheeky. (See Cat Defender posts of October 10, 2007 and November 16, 2007 entitled, respectively, "A Crafty Bird Lover Claims Responsibility for Stealing Six Cats from a Southampton Neighborhood and Concealing Their Whereabouts" and "Fletcher, One of the Cats Abducted from Bramley Crescent, Is Killed by a Motorist in Corhampton.")

Gardeners and wildlife biologists also liberally engage in the same patently unlawful tactic although in their case they are more likely to turn over the cats that they steal to shelters so as to have them do their dirty work for them. (See Cat Defender posts of June 15, 2006, August 19, 2010, and August 26, 2010 entitled, respectively, "A Serial Cat Killer on Long Island Traps His Neighbors' Cats and Then Gives Them to a Shelter to Exterminate," "Music Lessons and Buggsey Are Murdered by a Cat-Hating Gardener and an Extermination Factory Posing as an Animal Shelter in Saginaw," and "In Stark Contrast to Ailurophobic America, Ziegelchen's Illegal Trapping by a Gardener in Altstädten-Burbach is Roundly Condemned in Deutschland.")

Even if Dot somehow were able to avoid all of those perils, he would still be at the mercy of the elements and winters in Minnesota are deadly cold and snowy. In that regard, however, he seems to have caught a break, that is if he is still on his own.

According to data supplied by the National Weather Service, the thermometer in and around Watertown did not dip below freezing until October 25th and even then the lowest reading for the month was 23°F recorded on October 30th. During the month of November, nighttime lows ranged from 31°F on both November 26th and November 30th to 5°F on November 12th.

Even so, the thermometer was below freezing every night and two inches of snow fell on November 26th and that was followed by another 7.2 inches a day later on November 27th and 2.9 inches on November 30th. There were a few additional bursts of snow interspersed throughout the month but all of them with accumulations of less than an inch.

Conditions worsened substantially during December with sub-zero overnight lows have been recorded on December 9th, December 10th, December 11th, and December 15th. Single-digit readings also were recorded on December 12th, December 13th, December 14th, December 17th, and December 18th. All of those nights would have been difficult for any homeless cat to have gotten through but thanks to his fourteen pounds of weight and long fur Dot should have been able to have persevered if he could have gotten underneath either a house or some other structure.

Two other hazards of winter, antifreeze and the siren call of warm automobile engines, would have been lethal for him, however. (See Cat Defender posts of July 2, 2007 and January 5, 2006 entitled, respectively, "Cats Are Being Poisoned with Antifreeze in San Francisco but Animal Control Refuses to Take the Killings Seriously" and "A 'Miracle' Cat Survives a Seventy-Mile Trip Down the New Jersey Turnpike by Clinging to the Drive Shaft of an SUV.")

Dot also would have benefited from the fact that not all that much snow fell on Watertown during the month of December. For instance, 1.6 inches ushered in the new month on December 1st, another 2.5 inches fell on December 9th, 1.7 inches on December 12th, and half an inch came down the following day of December 13th.

Watertown's comparatively mild winter continued during the first half of January without any sub-zero readings until January 11th when the thermometer plummeted to -1°F and to -2°F on January 15th. Eight-tenths of an inch of snow fell on January 8th followed by an inch on January 13th and that was all for the first half of the month.

It thus is remotely conceivable that Dot could still be both alive and on his own somewhere in the vicinity of Watertown. If so, it is unlikely that his luck is going to hold out for much longer.

All that it would take would be either one prolonged blast of Arctic air or a huge snowstorm and that surely would be the end of him. (See Cat Defender posts of May 8, 2009, January 21, 2010, February 2, 2015, February 23, 2015, March 14, 2015, February 15, 2019, and March 23, 2019 entitled, respectively, "Domino, Feral and All Alone, Faces an Uncertain Future in Wisconsin Following an Unplanned Trip to Arizona," "Trapped Outdoors in a Snowstorm, Annie Is Brought Back from the Dead by the Compassion of a Good Samaritan and an Animal Control Officer," "Cruelly Declawed and Locked Up Indoors for All of His Life, Nicky Is Suddenly Thrust into the Bitter Cold and Snow for Twenty-One Consecutive Days with Predictably Tragic Results," "Abandoned to Tough It Out by His Lonesome in the Deadly Michigan Cold and Snow, Flick Sustains Horrific Injuries to His Front Paws When They Become Frozen to a Porch," "Ace Is Found Frozen to a Porch with His Eyes Goughed Out but the Authorities Are Too Lazy, Cheap, and Ailurophobic to Go After His Assailant," "A Wabash College Student Risks His Life in Order to Save a Cat That Had Fallen Through the Ice on a Frozen Lake but That Was Far from Being the End of Its Miseries," and "Fluffy Is Brought Back from the Dead after She Is Found Comatose in a Sarcophagus of Frozen Snow and Ice in Frigid Montana.")

Other than retaining the services of a private dick, it is not known what other measures that Dalbec has undertaken in order to locate Dot. Nevertheless, in hindsight she might have been better off contacting the capitalistic media as well as going on social media as soon as Dot disappeared and the CCSO had stiffed her.

That at least would have alerted local residents to have been on the lookout for him. She always has had other ideas, however, and they must be respected given that she is the one who is closest to the situation. "I still don't believe he dumped him," she averred to WCCO-TV in the video cited supra.

Although it is not believed that Dot was either tagged or tattooed, he was microchipped and the mere fact that he has not turned up at a shelter is one piece of evidence in support of her way of thinking. Surgeries, on the other hand, are a good deal more problematic in that they normally do not scan cats for chips unless they have a good reason for doing so.

Furthermore, they usually do not hang on to those who do not have either chips, tags, or tattoos. (See Cat Defender post of June 26, 2012 entitled "A Family in Wiltshire Turns to Social Media and Leaflets in Order to Shame a Veterinary Chain and a Foster Parent into Returning Tazzy.")

  Byron Thomas Vieau's Belated Confession

It additionally is informative to note that Dot has not found his way back home on his own. Although it is difficult to know exactly what to think about all those news reports concerning cats that have been able to miraculously locate their owners after they have either relocated elsewhere or they themselves have been dumped at distant locations, there would appear to be a measure of truth in at least some of them. (See Cat Defender posts of April 27, 2007 and April 10, 2014 entitled, respectively, "A French Chat Named Mimine Allegedly Walks Eight-Hundred-Thirty Kilometers in Order to Track Down the Family That Abandoned Her" and "Mayhem Inexplicitly Finds His Way to the New Address of the North Carolina Woman Who Earlier Had Cruelly Abandoned Him.")

A second possibility is that Vieau still has custody of Dot and does not have any intention whatsoever of returning him to Dalbec. Numerous individuals steal cats and afterwards fabricate all kinds of cockeyed reasoning in order to justify their larcenous conduct.

For example, in June of 2007 an unidentified woman stole a seventeen-year-old, longhaired tuxedo named Slim off the streets of the New Edinburgh neighborhood in Ottawa. His owners, Michel Giroux and Tanya Guay, only learned of his fate when she informed them of that fact by mail after obtaining their address from his tag.

"This is to inform you that I have your cat," the epistle began. "Obviously, I have no intention of returning him to the city street to be neglected again. If you really do care about his well-being, you'll be happy that he now lives a safe, sweet, peaceful happy life."

That stunning development and the accompanying lecture on the proper care of a cat left Giroux apoplectic. "Who does this person think she is to decide this cat is neglected?" he raged. "This person has taken it upon themselves (sic) to think that they (sic) have saved a cat when in point of fact, this cat is not neglected and he's loved and we just want him home."

As far as it is known, Giroux and Guay never again laid eyes on Slim. (See Cat Defender post of July 9, 2007 entitled "A Hungry and Disheveled Cat Named Slim Is Picked Up Off the Streets of Ottawa by a Rescuer Who Refuses to Return Him to His Owners.")

The only known similarity between Slim and Dot is Vieau's assertion in his December 11th confession that he "just wanted to give it (Dot) a home." Even that does not make sense in that he surely was well aware that he belonged to Dalbec.

A third possible explanation is that he has killed Dot. "...the unfortunate feline species seemed to be fair game for every kind of cruelty and neglect," celebrated veterinarian and author James Herriot declared in his 1994 book, Cat Stories. "They shot cats, threw things at them and set their dogs on them for fun."

Complicating matters further, not all feline abusers and killers are ornithologists, wildlife biologists, gardeners, and other assorted sociopaths. Even so-called pillars of society have been known to attack cats if presented with the right opportunity.

For instance on August 21, 2010, forty-five-year-old spinster and bank cashier Mary Bale from Coventry in Warwickshire picked up off the street a four-year-old female named Lola and nonchalantly stuffed her into a wheelie bin in order to be collected and subsequently killed by the garbagemen. Luckily, she was spared that awful fate when her owners, Stephanie and Darryl Andrews-Mann, learned of her desperate plight fifteen hours later after reviewing footage from a surveillance camera mounted outside their residence.

Let off by District Judge Caroline Goulborn of Coventry Magistrates' Court with a paltry £250 fine and £1,171 in court costs, Bale was anything but chastened. "I don't know what all the fuss is about," she earlier had told the Daily Mail on August 26, 2010. (See "Greyhaired Bank Worker Who Dumped Cat in Wheelie Bin Could Face Court as RSPCA Prosecutors Review Case.") "It's just a cat."

A fourth possibility could be that Vieau has sold Dot to either a research laboratory, a fur trafficker, or a concern that deals in feline flesh. Fifthly, it is remotely conceivable that he could have been motivated by a romantic interest in Dalbec. After all, she is unquestionably an attractive and vivacious young woman and he could have stolen Dot in a ploy to get next to her.

Regardless of his motivation and what he ultimately did with Dot, the most logical explanation is that he no longer has possession of him. Otherwise, he most likely would have cut a deal with the private dick and thus avoided being arrested and forced to stand trial.

Even though the situation looks to be all but hopeless, Dalbec needs to continue to operate on the premise that Dot is still alive. Her first order of business therefore should be to contact Carver County prosecuting attorney Mark Metz in Chaska.

Perhaps she could prevail upon him to cut a deal with Vieau that would secure the return of Dot. If that is not feasible, she should ask him to order the CCSO to issue search warrants for Vieau's residence and workplace.

She additionally could ask him about having the CCSO put Vieau under twenty-four-hour surveillance. If he is unwilling to do even that much, she will be left with no alternative other than to have her private investigator undertake that task.

Secondly, if she has not done so already she should contact all shelters and veterinarians in at least Watertown and Rockford and to ask them to be on the lookout for Dot. Thirdly, it is not too late for blanketing the area with Lost Cat posters and doing some door-to-door canvassing.

Fourthly, she needs to increase her presence on social media so as to get as many individuals as possible involved in the search for Dot. Perhaps she also could inveigle WCCO-TV into doing a follow-up story.

Fifthly, it is paramount that she file a civil lawsuit against the unidentified auto parts company for which Vieau works. When originally contacted by WCCO-TV the business, which is owned by Vieau's father, refused comment.

Sixthly, she might want to consider having a psychologist take a look at Vieau's confession in order to gain a professional's insight into his personality and behavior. Seventhly, she might want to call in the assistance of an animal communicator.

Heidi Dalbec with an Unidentified Cat 

For example, Tanja Bärtschiger of Bundesverband Tierkommunikation Schweiz in Zeihen, twenty-five kilometers northwest of Aargau, claims to be able to locate lost cats through a combination of photographs, mental telepathy, and remote viewing. If Dalbec should prefer not to range quite so far afield, there surely must be similar professionals operating in Minneapolis and St. Paul. (See Cat Defender post of October 5, 2019 entitled "Is Chatting Up Cats in the Neighborhood a Productive Means of Locating One That Has Gone AWOL? Some Individuals in Japan Swear That It Is.")

If she should elect to go that route, she would be well-advised to obtain references and testimonials before forking over any money in that some critics claim that this emerging profession is a scam. In that light, Bärtschiger would be the better choice in that she offers a money back guarantee for her services. Besides, Germans are far more honest than Americans; with the latter, most everything is either a racket, a lie, or pure bullshit.

Eighthly, she needs to religiously keep her contact data current and to continue paying her dues to the database company that services Dot's microchip. Miracles still do occur every once in a while in this world and cats long believed to be dead as well as those who have become separated from their owners by continents and mighty oceans have been found alive more than a decade later thanks to these new identification devices. (See Cat Defender posts of March 31, 2010 and August 26, 2015 entitled, respectively, "A Winnipeg Family Is Astounded by Tiger Lily's Miraculous Return after Having Been Believed Dead for Fourteen Years" and "A Myriad of Cruel and Unforgivable Abandonments, a Chinese Puzzle, and Finally the Handing Down and Carrying Out of a Death Sentence Spell the End of Long-Suffering and Peripatetic Tigger," plus CNN, November 26, 2019, "A Cat Missing for Five Years Was Found Twelve-Hundred Miles Away. He Was Just Reunited with His Owner.")

As sad and tragic as it is, there nevertheless are several vitally important lessons to be learned from Vieau's theft of Dot. The most important of which is the vulnerability of overly friendly cats.

"He was really a special little guy, very friendly and outgoing," Dalbec told WCCO-TV in the video cited supra. "The kind of cat who loved car rides, which is rare. So I was always so careful with him."

She was not careful enough, however, at least not on October 10th and that faux pas cost her his continued companionship.

The socialization of cats is a double-edged sword. Whereas the friendly ones have a much better chance of making it out of shelters alive than do their skittish cousins, it is precisely their outgoing personalities that make them not only attractive to cat thieves like Vieau but their abductions a piece of cake.

On the other hand, it is difficult for thieves to get their larcenous hands on those that possess a healthy distrust of humans. Correspondingly, it is precisely their wary personalities that shelters, Animal Control officers, veterinarians, and others use as a convenient excuse in order to snuff out their lives.

Although less socialized cats do not have any defenses against traps, they are in many respects far better off than those that are too friendly. Generally speaking, cats should be trained not to either approach strangers or to accept food from them. (See Cat Defender post of July 14, 2016 entitled "Missy, Who Was Too Kindly Disposed Toward Humans for Her Own Good, Is Memorialized in Wood at the Bus Stop That She Called Her Home for Almost a Decade.")

Secondly, even though microchips have become very popular identification devices in recent years, they are not any substitute for collars, tags, and tattoos. Perhaps in this case if Dot had been collared and tagged that would have been sufficient in order to have stilled Vieau's stealing hands.

Thirdly, this case has demonstrated once again the value of good surveillance equipment. Without it, Dalbec would have been clueless as to what had become of Dot. (See Cat Defender post of February 22, 2017 entitled "The Months of Unrelenting Abuse Meted Out to Elfie by a Roommate Graphically Demonstrate the Advantages as Well as the Limitations of Using Surveillance Cameras in Order to Protect Cats.")

Fourthly, considering the utter unwillingness of both the law enforcement community and so-called animal protection groups to even investigate, let alone prosecute, crimes perpetrated against cats, this case once more has demonstrated writ large that private detectives are about the only recourse available to aggrieved owners. The laws urgently need to be amended, however, so as to permit them to both make arrests as well as to lay charges and to prosecute cases of animal cruelty. (See Cat Defender post of April 2, 2015 entitled "A Cornishman Shells Out £10,000 on Private Peepers in Order to Track Down Farah's Killer but Once Again Gets Stiffed by Both the Police and the RSPCA.")

Fifthly, the theft of Dot reaffirms that anyone, any animal, conveyance, and container that either enters or exits a cat's home, garden, or neighborhood is thoroughly capable of claiming its life. (See Cat Defender posts of August 28, 2006, September 22, 2019, November 6, 2006, June 1, 2012, July 16, 2007, and July 21, 2008 entitled, respectively, "A Marauding Pack of Vicious Raccoons Rips Ten House Cats to Shreds and Terrorizes Residents in Olympia but Wildlife Officials Refuse to Intervene," "Sparkle Is Killed on the Front Stoop of Her House by an Unleashed Dog in the Latest of Centuries-Old Deadly Attacks That Bear the Unmistakable Imprimatur of the House of Commons," "Trapped in a Moving Van for Five Days, a Texas Cat Named Neo Is Finally Freed in Colorado," "A Tattoo Unravels Burli's Secret Past but It Is a Radio Broadcast That Ultimately Leads to His Happy Reunion with His Forever Grateful Current Guardian," "Accidentally Trapped in a Shipping Crate, a Calico Cat Named Spice Survives a Nineteen-Day Sea Voyage from Hawaii to San Bernardino," and "Janosch Survives Being Sent Through the Post from Bayern to the Rhineland.")

Looking at this terrible tragedy from a much broader perspective, it is nothing short of mindboggling the myriad of things that can go wrong with the care of a cat. Clearly, being an owner is not for the faint of heart.

Most distressing of all, whereas most owners have the luxury of living and learning from their past mistakes that is anything but the case with their beloved companions. Au contraire, with them it is all-too-often a case of one strike and they are out, not temporarily but permanently.

In Dalbec's case, she has been forced into paying a hefty price for momentarily taking her eye off of Dot. "It has been very upsetting and stressing," she acknowledged to WCCO-TV in the video cited supra. "I've lost a lot of sleep over it."

Worst still, there does not appear to be any end in sight to her suffering and pain in that Vieau, quite obviously, is not the type of individual who is capable of empathizing with the feelings and needs of either her or Dot. He accordingly should be locked up in some hellhole prison and kept there until he comes clean but everyone knows that the courts are not about to oblige.

The only palliative for Dalbec accordingly might be for her to redouble her efforts in order to locate him as opposed to merely giving up in despair. That at least would give her tortured and beleaguered soul a temporary respite from the apparent hopelessness of the situation.

Such an undertaking would require, however, a considerable investment of time, toil, and money and only she knows if she has any more of those valuable commodities to expend. What she most assuredly does have is US$2,000 which she is offering as a reward for information leading to Dot's return and she accordingly can be reached at work at 763-242-4006.

Photos: Heidi Dalbec (Dot, the abduction, and confession), Facebook (Dalbec with another cat), and Carver County (Kamerud).