Django REST Framework ModelSerializer - Object not saved

I've a model, and one of it's field refers to an overrided User instance (changed in Django settings).

When I'm performing a POST from my client, the route ends up here at the create method:

class CatView(ModelViewSet):
    authentication_classes = (authentication.TokenAuthentication,)
    permission_classes = (permissions.IsAuthenticated,)
    serializer_class = CatListSerializer

    def get_queryset(self):
        return Cat.objects.filter(owner=self.request.user).order_by('id')

    '''
    def list(self, request, format=None):
        serializer = CatGetSerializer(Cat.objects.filter(owner=request.user), context={'request': request}, many=True)
        return Response(serializer.data)
    '''

    def perform_create(self, serializer):
        serializer.save(owner=self.request.user)

    def create(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        serializer = CatPutSerializer(data=request.data)
        if serializer.is_valid():
            serializer.create(serializer.data)
            return Response(serializer.data, status=HTTP_201_CREATED)
        return Response(serializer.errors, status=HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

When using a PUT to do a partial update on my model, it works fine. But creating one just doesn't work. I manually inject the user instance into the serializer and asks it to create the object. Then... nothing. No exception raises, it returns the proper data, but the object is not in my database, not being saved.

What's the issue here?

EDIT:

When I'm adding the owner field to the CatPutSerializer, it opens security issues since I don't know how to prevent this to be changed as I don't want the client to send me which user to assign. And when I'm duplicating the serializer to be used on POST only requests, it says it misses the owner field...

Here's the CatPutSerializer:

class CatPutSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Cat
        fields = ('name', 'weight', 'sterilized', 'image', 'tag', 'dob', 'race', 'gender')

UPDATE:

As suggested, I'm now doing as follows :

def create(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
    pdb.set_trace()
    serializer = CatPutSerializer(data=request.data)
    if serializer.is_valid():
        serializer.save(owner=self.request.user)
        return Response(serializer.data, status=HTTP_201_CREATED)
    return Response(serializer.errors, status=HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

Though removed the perform_create overriding.

SOLUTION:

After further investigation, it doesn't seem related to drf but to Django / PostgreSQL itself, so I checked to Django model save method, and it seems that my custom image processing prevented from new objects to be created... Changed it and now works.