Fear vs. Education: The Media and Stray Cats

According to a recent News 12 story, a stray cat in Ossining tested positive for rabies.  The media is at the ready with breathless, sensationalist coverage, in spite of this extremely rare occurrence. What exactly is the point of such news coverage without any context or real problem-solving information? 

I wonder why issues---like stray and feral cats---are presented with so little context and factual information. I also wonder why the media continues to make the public fear animals. Perhaps I can provide some context and education in this blog post. 

Stray cats roam the streets because people dump them there. Our shelter system does not have the resources to take in feral and stray cats, other than to kill them. A certain number of outdoor cats have been co-existing with humans for thousands of years, and providing the valuable function of rodent control. However, in our throw-away society, we have many cats who are simply abandoned when people grow tired of them, or who proliferate when people refuse to spay and neuter. 

So we have a situation where a kind-hearted person is presented with the following scenario. This has been my personal experience, and that of many others. They see a cat wandering around in the cold--perhaps in the middle of winter. They feel compassion for the creature and put out a plate of food. They call the local shelter the next day and ask if they can come to take the stray cat. The shelter tells them they do not take in stray cats. The kind-hearted person is faced with a dilemma: let the cat starve or freeze, or continue to act out of kindness and feed the cat. Through lack of information or resources, or both, they do not take the necessary next step to stop future births.

Spring arrives and the cat appears to be pregnant. The person calls the shelter again. Again, there is no help available, unless they live in a community where the shelter will assist them with a TNR program (trap, neuter, return), and take the kittens to be adopted. In my case, I researched TNR myself, found a vet willing to help me, and trapped, neutered, vaccinated, and cared for 15 cats in my community.  It was an expensive and labor-intensive job for a private individual to do. But I did it, because there was no one else to do it. 

This is an extremely large job to fall on the average citizen. But that is exactly where it falls, unfortunately, because we have no system in place for stray cats. So, in light of this, perhaps rather than have stories about rabies, and useless panic-inducing “alerts” by the Department of Health, our news media and local governments could focus on how to address the issue pro-actively and constructively. Someone with an eye for fairness could investigate why cats have so thoroughly fallen through the cracks in our society, and what we can do to help them. Instead, we have stories designed to incite fear, and very likely increase animal cruelty, while doing nothing toward educating people or solving problems.