‘Great British Bake Off’ Judge Prue Leith Shocks Fans by Revealing She Drowned Kittens as a Child

Prue Leith, one of the longtime judges on The Great British Bake Off, has shocked fans with the revelation that she once drowned a bag of kittens as a child.

The 82-year-old television personality opened up about the traumatic experience in her new memoir, “I’ll Try Anything Once.”

Prue says she was only 11 at the time and her mother instructed her to kill the newborn kittens just hours after they were born.

“My mother and I, then 11, had just drowned some kittens… and for weeks I imagined those poor dead creatures,” she wrote in the book (via Huffington Post). “Too many kittens was a frequent occurrence and there had come a day when my mother, unable to find homes for yet another litter, decided to drown the latest batch.”

Prue said that her attempts to change her mother’s mind “were met with a firm, ‘Darling, it has to be done. They are only a few hours old. They will hardly know it’s happening.’”

“I held the bag under the water until the last kitten had stopped mewing,” she said, adding that they “fought like the devil for life.”

Prue explained why she included the experience in her book.

“This happened in the early 1940′s, when I was 11 years old, being brought up on a farm in South Africa,” she said in a statement. “I wrote about it honestly in my book, as an 11-year-old it was an extremely traumatic experience, not one I would forget, however it is what happened 70 years ago. Thankfully today in the UK we have the choice of neutering our cats and have more options to home kittens, although sadly in some parts of the world it is still an issue.”

See how the Great British Bake Off judges rank in net worth.