Fireball

She was two months old. A calico, orange and white, small enough to hold in one hand. Look at her face in the photograph at the top of this page: she is behind bars, looking at the camera with enormous round eyes, the way kittens do when they are trying to figure out whether you are safe. In another photo she reaches a tiny paw through the cage, stretching for contact, for warmth, for any hand at all.

We do not know much about her life before she ended up in Peng Xiang's hands, and that is one of the worst parts: she was nobody's, or she was taken from somebody, and either way she ended up in a place where no one was coming to help her.

We named her Fireball after the fact. She earned the name not in life, but in what she came to represent after death.

She was starved for several days. Then Peng Xiang used a dull knife to slash her spine. The skin on her back was split in two, and the skin and muscle were sliced open and peeled away piece by piece. She was two months old and she was conscious for all of it.

The torture lasted four hours. She cried until she could no longer make sound. When the skinning was finished, the electrocution began. After four hours, she was finally allowed to die. It was filmed. It was uploaded. It was sold.

Peng Xiang did not do this in a moment of rage. He did it on camera, for an audience, because there is a market for it. The sign he held beside her body bore his name, 彭翔, also known as Liu Wencai (刘文才), his phone number, and the date: March 26, 2024. He was proud of what he did. The footage circulated through Telegram channels where people pay to watch animals die, where torturers take requests, where specific cats are advertised with photos and a date they will be killed. Fireball was a product in that system. Her pain was the point.

Her photo spread. Feline Guardians picked it up. Advocacy accounts in Brazil, Turkey, across Europe posted her face. TikTok creators used her as the image that makes people stop scrolling. She went from a dead kitten in a Telegram channel to the reason thousands of people now know this crisis exists.

That is not a happy ending. There is no happy ending for Fireball. But her name is on every investigation this group opens, and the photograph of her behind those cage bars is the thing that turned anger into action for a lot of people who are now doing this work every day.

She mattered. She still matters. That has to count for something.