French railways find themselves at the heart of a debate on Thursday around their management of cases of domestic animals on train departure tracks, the day after the death of a cat in a Parisian station.
The public railway company SNCF implemented a maximum delay of 20 minutes at the departure of a given train last year to allow the recovery of a pet that had escaped onto the railway tracks, two years after the publicized crush of the cat Neko at Paris-Montparnasse station.
“After having immobilized the train concerned as well as the one next door for more than thirty minutes, around twenty” agents, members of the station staff, the train and the police as well as firefighters “mobilized tirelessly to try to find the cat”, explains SNCF Voyageurs in a message broadcast Thursday on X and addressed to the owner of the animal, Olivier Benkemoun, a journalist for the television channel CNews.
Any means? Which ones please? No. No one came down on the tracks even though we had located our cat. You only waited 20 minutes before restarting your train…. https://t.co/pEqVojkI4c
— olivier benkemoun (@obenkemoun) July 1, 2026
“Despite all these efforts, we had to restart the train at very slow speed while continuing the research,” adds the subsidiary of the SNCF group responsible for passenger rail transport.
Asked by AFP on Thursday, a spokesperson for SNCF Voyageurs recalled that it was “impossible to go down on the tracks for safety reasons, unless you risk cascading consequences” in the operation of the station.
Olivier Benkemoun announced Wednesday in a message published on
The 30 Million Friends Animal Defense Foundation is also calling for SNCF Voyageurs to extend this deadline and affirms on X that it intends to “explore all legal avenues” in this regard.
Dear @JeanCASTEX, after the cat Neko, the cat Gina.
Let’s not wait for the next one. The same causes producing the same effects, it is obviously necessary to modify the protocols put in place by the @GroupeSNCF and make them “more human”. A large French company cannot… pic.twitter.com/0J5mm4Hemc
— 30 Million Friends Foundation (@30millionsdamis) July 2, 2026
