“[She gets] up every morning as if it was her job to go out there and provide for the family.”
Mónica Vicéns couldn’t say no to fostering three little kittens that had been abandoned in her backyard by a friend. She instantly fell in love with the tiniest of the group, a white and brown tabby, and realized she couldn’t bear to let her go.
Vicéns told The Dodo, “China was the lone female and the runt of the three.” “I already had a 4-month-old male cat from the same yard named Waffles, and I’d fallen in love with China, so I chose to keep her.”
Vicéns moved to a property with a wide backyard a few months later, and the thin kitten evolved into a vicious huntress.
“We had to keep all the doors and windows shut to make sure she couldn’t go out since she always crept in with some living thing in her jaws,” Vicéns explained. “Every morning, she would wake up as if it were her duty to go out and provide for the family.”
Vicéns didn’t enjoy all the bugs China gave her every day, and she made it plain to her cat by refusing to let her out. China, however, was still determined to present something to her mother, so she turned her focus to the interior of the house.
Outside her door, Vicéns began to see stacks of her roommate’s socks. She first mistook her roommate’s dog for someone bringing them to her, but they soon caught China red-handed. “She was making some strange meows,” Vicéns explained, “so we gently looked around the corner and saw her dumping the sock beside my door.” “It was the most amusing thing we’d ever seen!”
China eventually made her way outside again, but this time she brought items as gifts instead of living ones, much to her mother’s relief.
China brought her smokes first, followed by matches, which she left outside the front door. Vicéns had no idea where the goods came from and believed they belonged to her roommate.
“After a few days, additional objects began to surface, and that’s when I pieced everything together,” Vicéns explained. “She’d been breaking into my neighbor’s yard for weeks and wouldn’t stop. I’d instantly return everything to their yard when she dropped it, and she’d say things like, ‘Hey! I thought I gave you this!’ As a result, I had to return all of the products at the end of the day.”
Vicéns discovered that China had a set routine when she left the house: “She’ll swiftly race to her favorite spot of dirt to roll about in it, then she’ll be off to burglarize the streets,” Vicéns said. “She’ll return with something, leave it at my door, and wait there yelling for me.”
Nobody appeared to believe Vicéns when she informed her friends about the cat burglaries in China. So she put up a camera outside the door and recorded herself doing it, then shared the recordings on Instagram and TikTok. Vicéns was still concerned that China’s theft would enrage her neighbors.
Vicéns explained, “I couldn’t keep lying for her, so I came clean.” “I left a suitcase with their belongings and a letter describing what was going on for the neighbors.”
Fortunately, the neighbors were unconcerned about China breaking into their home. Vicéns has subsequently set up a “return box” on their property in the hopes of recovering their misplaced outdoor things.
China might be a challenge, but Vicéns wouldn’t exchange her for anything. “[She] loves to roll around in mud, hunt, steal, knock stuff off tables, and aggravate me to death,” Vicéns stated. “Every day, she makes me chuckle.”