This Monday, January 23, 2023 on C8, TPMP columnists commented on the news about the cat cut in half under a train. If the majority wanted sanctions against the SNCF, three of them rather defended the agents to the detriment of the cat. Words that shocked the web.
As every evening, Cyril Hanouna and his columnists returned to current events in Touche pas à mon poste. In addition to receiving distressed bakers as well as a former butcher who is aware of the sanitary conditions of selling meat in supermarkets, Géraldine Maillet, Valérie Bénaïm, Benjamin Castaldi or even Gilles Verdez debated several issues. Among them is the relevance or not of modernizing the “baby change” pictograms, which generally show a woman at work with her child.
But also a news story that took place on January 2nd at the Montparnasse station: when they were preparing to leave for Bordeaux, two women let their cat escape, which took refuge under their train. Despite their report, the SNCF staff refused to delay the departure… And their cat was cut in half on the tracks. “They said ‘it’s just a cat’ and that it wasn’t their problem”, the young owner had testified in front of BFMTV’s cameras. The SNCF would then have offered the victims to pick up the body of the cat and would have been content to offer them a train ticket…
A sordid story that made the rounds in the media and shocked the Brigitte Bardot Foundation and social networks. To the question: “Should the SNCF be condemned?”, six TPMP columnists answered yes without hesitation. Valérie Benaïm thus expressed her disagreement with the decision to kill “a living and sensitive being”. “The cat is important enough to ticket him, but not important enough to kill him,” she said. Guillaume Genton believed that people who “consciously decided not to save this cat” consider the animal “like an object”. Gilles Verdez went so far as to hope for jail time for these people.
“Heartless people who only think about their little people”
But if the majority therefore said they were indignant, three columnists took up the defense of SNCF. If everyone acknowledged the sadness of the event, they were not shocked by the decision. “What should have been done?” Géraldine Maillet asked with her usual firmness. “If we moved the train, we condemned it. They imagined that by moving the train the cat would have run away by reflex, but no…”, she continued, suggesting instead to listen to the version of the agents who according to to her, did “what they could”.
Bernard Montiel, who had revealed earlier in the show to have been a railway worker in the past, agreed with him and recalled the danger of electrified tracks: “You don’t want to risk your life either, even though you obviously love animals”, he advanced. As for Benjamin Castaldi, he clearly said that the rescue of a cat was not a sufficient reason to delay all the passengers of a train. If the survey carried out live showed that the viewers were as divided as the columnists on the set, the twittos were extremely shocked by the words of Benjamin Castaldi, Bernard Montiel and Géraldine Maillet. The columnists have been described as “heartless”, “rotten” or even “despicable”.
Video. The clash between Géraldine Maillet and Cyril Hanouna over Daniel Riolo
