The cat in the bin story that took on nine lives of its own

PRESENT TENSE:ON WEDNESDAY afternoon, if you turned on Sky News, you would have found the CCTV film of that woman Mary Bale putting a cat in a wheelie bin being replayed over and over, close up, in slow motion, as if this was the most important piece of footage since the Zapruder film made the world familiar with what a bullet did to JFK's head.

Over and over it was replayed. Slowed. Slower. Bale stroking the cat. Lifting the bin lid. Casually placing the cat in the bin. Walking away. Then doing it all over again. In close up. In closer up. Grainy. Grainier. And then again, until it became mildly hypnotic, like a piece of video art. Or until you could almost convince yourself that you could see a second cat-binner on a nearby grassy knoll.

As is the standard operating procedure in such mildly controversial, but televised, cases, death sentences were immediately issued online. Maybe they were posted by some of those who needed some new entertainment after growing bored of posting on the Raoul Moat Was a Hero sites.

As a punishment, it would have been proportionate, and a TV ratings hit, if Bale had herself been forced to spend 15 hours in a bin while being filmed by a camera. But UK law doesn’t allow for that, so instead she was tortured by the media until she said sorry. Then she was tortured some more because she didn’t sound like she meant it. She sounded instead like she was sorry that the media was on her doorstep, but that the cat thing per se wasn’t causing her to lose sleep.

And, immediately, she split viewers into two camps: those who love cats and everything about their purring fluffiness; and those who hear their strangulated love songs late at night and fantasise about throwing them in a bin.

There was another animal story in the papers on Wednesday. They’ve built a bridge for dormice over a Welsh road. Many locals have greeted this with incredulity – a terrible waste of money.

Meanwhile, on the same island, a woman was under police protection because she put a cat in a wheelie bin. Somewhere in the philosophical universe, there is an equation that measures how many massacred dormice are worth one temporarily recyclable cat.

Later that day another story broke – that of the dead “spy” – and attention was finally diverted towards a story at odds with the cat in the bin. Here, there was no footage, no substance, only an idea, a fantasy. Even the reports took on the tone of a low-grade thriller.

The Sky News reporter said that he had arranged to meet a former MI6 officer, as if it was a rendezvous agreed using invisible ink and suitcase swaps at a park bench. In fact, the same chap then turned up on every other television station, saying the same thing, which was very little, and with only different backdrops differentiating each report. Somehow, none of the TV news reports showed a clip from The Bourne Ultimatum. But you have to believe they thought about it.

Anyhow, it was then back to the cat lady. The attention could be considered remarkable. She was not, after all, a notorious cat-dumper, a serial putter of cats in wheelie bins. There had not been a huge manhunt.

It led to an understandable sense that this cat-bin story was the result of the silly season, in which the media is in the giddy depths of. I’m not so sure.

It may have received more attention, for longer, than it would have done at other times of the year, but there is something about ridiculous animal stories that appeal to the public.

And while silly-season stories have often involved animals, the big ones, ironically, have tended to be scare stories with potential to gather pace – such as the “great white sharks off England” story of recent years, or the bloodthirsty foxes of earlier this summer.

Instead, the key element of the cat-bin saga was that it was filmed. News is wherever the cameras are. Plus, it was short, clear, silent and bizarre enough to become a global hit – on TV and online. So when the cat’s owners decided to get a CCTV camera it turned out to be a decision with extraordinary consequences. It was supposed to catch whatever idiots were bumping into their car, not to fill two days of Sky News. But it did. And one cat’s story became a global phenomenon in a world busy with unfilmed cruelty.