A CAT-LOVING Belton woman has been left devastated after her treasured pet Kitt was dumped on a rubbish tip before she had the chance to say farewell.Kitt had been knocked over by a passing car on Sunday, September 20, in Minsmere Road, Belton.

A CAT-LOVING Belton woman has been left devastated after her treasured pet Kitt was dumped on a rubbish tip before she had the chance to say farewell.

Kitt had been knocked over by a passing car on Sunday, September 20, in Minsmere Road, Belton. The following day, his body was collected by the Great Yarmouth Borough Council's services team.

A worried Lynn Lister, of Bury Close, searched everywhere and five days afterwards discovered her 15-year-old pet's fate when a resident told her the cat had been taken away.

Lynn immediately called Great Yarmouth Borough Council's services team on Friday to see if they still had the tortoiseshell cat but she found Kitt's body had been taken to Aldeby landfill site near Beccles the day before and dumped.

The service team had collected the pet after a resident had reported it had been killed.

The body was put into a storage facility at the Churchill Road depot with other animals killed on the borough's roads, including foxes, Muntjac deer and seagulls.

But rather than keeping the dead animals for a longer period, staff decided to empty the storage area four days after Kitt's body had been recovered for hygiene reasons, due to the warm weather.

Mrs Lister had intended to have her cat cremated and keep the ashes.

She said: “My cat is on a landfill site. If the council had taken her to the pet crematorium and given her a proper cremation then I might have accepted that, but to put her on a landfill site is totally out of order.

“I phoned around here, there and everywhere to find out where she was and then I found out she had been disposed of.”

Ian Barnett, general manager at GYB Services, explained his staff put carcasses in a specially designed storage box where they were kept for a number of days to see if members of the public wanted to claim them.

However, he added because of the warm weather, the large number of carcasses gathering in the box and the lack of inquiries from the public, the service team's refuse manager decided to empty the box early.

Legally, the service team does not have to keep roadkill for a set amount of time and it is not obliged to incinerate the animals.

Mr Barnett said in any case the nearest incineration depot was at Cambridge, which was too expensive.

“It is a very unfortunate situation. If she had called on the Tuesday then there would probably have not been a problem, but because of the situation we had here with a number of carcasses to dispose of, they all went together.”