The man who tortured cats on camera as "Dark Lord" is in police custody in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, and his name is Luo Fanghong. We announced it on Instagram this week together with the Chinese activists and partner organizations, Feline Guardians among them, who spent years building the case against him. This is the full account of the case, and it includes a correction to our victims page.
Undercover volunteers first documented him in March 2024. His videos were made in a room he had set up for the purpose, with cats caged or tied down in front of a running camera while he worked through his equipment on them, and the footage went out to the chat groups where people trade this material. Our own memorials for his victims record crossbow bolts, spring-loaded traps, electrocution, hot mustard forced down a kitten's throat, a microwave, a washing machine, and a chainsaw. Every one of those memorials was written by a volunteer who sat through the video.
When Luo started posting, he called himself Peng Xiang. That name already belonged to another user who had been posting similar videos, with the same politically charged jabs at China's national leaders, and the two were close enough that volunteers, us included, treated them as one person. According to the activists who worked the case, the original Peng Xiang went quiet right around the time Luo picked up the name, which kept the confusion going for more than two years, and then he resurfaced in August of this year.
The original Peng Xiang is the one who killed Fireball, the two-month-old kitten on our home page, who some of you know as Miko. That person has not been identified. Luo was borrowing an identity that belonged to someone else, and his arrest does nothing for the cats the other man killed, so the search for Fireball's killer is still open.
The photograph above is part of what the activists documented from his videos; the rest of the set, which is in our announcement at the bottom of this page, includes crossbows and a chainsaw. The book is the same political theater both men named Peng Xiang went in for. The small card next to it bears the characters 晴天, Qingtian, which is one of the names Ma Fei went by before he was arrested in Pingdingshan this spring.
Volunteers on the ground also found out how he got rid of the bodies. According to their findings, he dismembered the cats, buried the remains in a vase filled with soil, and then carried the soil and bone fragments downstairs a little at a time so the building's cleaners would not notice anything. Chinese activists have since recovered bone fragments that they say belonged to his victims, and their photographs are in the announcement below.
Firestar is the orange cat in that photograph. Luo bound him and cooked him in the microwave for four minutes, then took him out and electrocuted him while he was dying, and Tigerstar, who was tied up in the same room, could be seen reflected in the microwave door watching all of it before the same thing was done to him. The volunteer who wrote their memorial called them warrior cats, and Firestar is one of the faces in the memorial slides the activists published with the announcement, next to Triss.
The activists apologized in their announcement for keeping this quiet for so long, and they shouldn't have had to. Going public would have warned him, and anything on his devices could have been wiped before police got to it, so no one involved spoke publicly until the case was ready. They have said openly that they do not know whether someone tipped him off, or whether this ends with him charged. Chinese activists got the case to police in time, and Luo is in custody because of them.
We don't know yet what he is being held on. China has no national animal cruelty law, and when Ma Fei was arrested for torturing an estimated 1,500 cats, his penalty was ten days of administrative detention on a public-order charge, which we wrote about in Ten Days for Fifteen Hundred. This arrest is the best news this work has given us in a long time, and it could still end with him back home in a week and a half. We will report it either way.
Chinese activists working with Project No More and Feline Guardians were able to identify him and get the case in front of police.
Because we believed Dark Lord and Peng Xiang were the same man, our victims page credited Peng Xiang with every cat either of them killed, and we have fixed it. Twelve memorials, covering twenty-one cats, now name Luo Fanghong. Six now name the original Peng Xiang, Fireball's and Monica's among them, and we have marked Raindance, Nico, and Salem as speculated until we can say which of the two killed them. Our volunteers wrote these memorials before any of this was known, and we have left their words exactly as they wrote them, so some still say Peng Xiang in the text even where the record above them now says Luo.
These are the cats Luo Fanghong killed that we have memorials for: Sebastian, Sundae, Velvet, Triss, Firestar and Tigerstar, Popsicle, Ruhçuk, Nugget, Hazelnut, Jester, Daphne and Scout, and Rhea and her kittens, Pumpernickel, Crystal, Coffee Cake, Kairo, Garden, Cephei, and Popo. The activists' slides also name Sophie, and there are more cats in his videos than anyone has been able to name.
Our announcement, with the activists' findings and their memorial slides, is below.