Screenshot of a Daily Mail article titled “Elena Lenina paints kitten pink for party and the cat later DEAD after vets found it was poisoned by toxic dye”, showing mainstream UK coverage of the CEN pink cat story with multiple images and video stills of the dyed animal. The article presents the story as a dramatic animal-welfare item, naming Russian writer Elena Lenina, reporting claims that the kitten had been used as a fashion accessory at a “pretty in pink” party, and crediting CEN for the material. Its significance is that it shows the story was not treated at the time as obviously fake, marginal, or unpublishable, but as a high-impact agency story that major publishers were prepared to use prominently because of its visual and emotional pull. In the wider BuzzFeed/CEN narrative, this matters because stories of this type were later used to attack CEN’s reliability, while the same media ecosystem had already published, credited and monetised the material. The record helps show how the later criticism depended on selective hindsight rather than a fair account of how viral foreign-news stories were actually handled by mainstream outlets at the time.