'Cruel' body art loving pet owner drugs cat then covers it in gangster tattoos
A tattoo fanatic is under fire from animal rights groups after covering his beloved Sphynx cat in ink.
The man, named only as Aleksandr, has covered his virtually hairless pet cat, called Demon, in gangster tattoos.
Demon has four large tattoos on its sides and chest.
The inking was carried out by Aleksandr, who has 10 tattoos of his own.
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He said that he had to give Demon an anaesthetic so that he could stand the pain of the ink needle and admitted that he might not have been doing the right thing.
“Of course I feel pity for doing it to him. It’s not like he wanted to do it himself. He has a different skin, so tattoos are applied differently,” said Aleksandr, who lives in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg.
“I hope it is not too bad for him, it is not his first tattoo. Usually he feels fine and recovers from the anaesthesia pretty fast.”
The tattoos chosen by Aleksandr are those typically worn by criminals in Russia, including representations of a prison tower, a pretty woman and a cigarette.
They are often used to denote the seniority of the member of a criminal gang, how long they have served in prison and the seriousness of their crimes.
But it has left animal activists unimpressed.
Yelizaveta Skorynina condemned Aleksandr for putting Demon through the pain of the ordeal for no reason other than his own vanity.
She said that the skin of Sphynx cats was extremely sensitive and that giving the pet an anaesthetic was also an unnecessary risk.
“The drug turns off the movement of the cat, but the brain is still working. If he does it frequently, it could affect its heart,” she said.
However, another local tattooist, Aleksandr Purtov, defended his namesake, saying that what he had done was no worse than a farmer branding his livestock.
“It is an old practice, this is why I am neutral to it,” he added.
Sphynx cats were developed through selective breeding and are known for their lack of fur but are not completely hairless.