To predict what would happen today, one only needed to look into history.
If one carefully compared the cat torture incident this time with the cat torture incident in the middle centuries, it would be easy to find some similarities between the two.
The statue in their shop was modeled after the original one in the British Museum, but was there only one original statue? There was only one such statue, and the humans were so lucky as to dig it up? Would anyone believe these kinds of odds?
The more logical explanation was that there was actually more than one of these Holy Cat statues, and that a thousand years ago, Europeans had dug one up. They had then dug up another at the beginning of the 20th century and placed it in the British Museum.