hypothetically, would it be illegal to train a cat to steal from a grocery store and deliver the loot to me

@lea yes, but cats don’t snitch

@lea training? no. the shoplifting however nothing guarantee the cat won’t snitch

@lea i think there's been cases where people trained dogs to steal stuff and it was considered illegal

@lea what if the catgirl does it on its own…

@lea yes

@lea I don't think there are any specific laws specifically against this.

Just saying.

@lea
Yep, cat burglar.

@lea I once heard that some bus drivers in Brazil in 1969 were arrested for training beetles to steal money from locked coin boxes, but I couldn’t find any evidence that this was true beyond the radio programme I heard it from (broadcast in 2018) and a single forum post from 2011 in which someone says they read this somewhere once and didn’t investigate further.

I’d quite like to find the original source, maybe I should try emailing the BBC about it (since presumably they’d have done some more research than reading the one forum post I found).

@lea

I've read that cats are considered "free spirits" in some jurisdictions -- as in their behavior is not the legal responsibility of the owners.

And then there are crows, ...
https://www.tiktok.com/@curiouzclicks/video/7275121640655047941

@lea pretty sure in the US it would be legal, but making the cat actually do it would not be.

If the cat just happened to do it without you instructing it to… that’s debatable