Cat Crisis Talking Points
You may be applying for discretionary funding, requesting budget meetings with City Council or just making phone calls to create awareness. Here are some tips to get your message across effectively.
1) Summarize the problem succinctly and emphasize the city’s responsibility to play a role:
NYC is in a cat crisis. There is no Department of Animal Welfare and no budget to address the problem so it falls on private citizens, especially in our most under-resourced communities, to address rapidly reproducing feral cats and unprecedented numbers of abandoned pet cats that have not been spayed or neutered.
The pandemic resulted in drastic service cuts from privately-funded spay-neuter services and then a post-pandemic vet shortage meant that rescuers never returned to the volume of spay/neuter appointments needed to stay on top of the cat reproductive cycle. Inflation and economic hardship, combined with skyrocketing vet costs has resulted in an epidemic of abanonded pet cats, as owners can no longer afford them and spay/neuter can cost around $1000.
The nonprofit, privately-funded model of cat rescue work in NYC is not working. Community members are physically, emotionally and financially exhausting themselves, using their own private resources to solve this very public municipal problem.
2) Offer a simple solution:
We need city-funded spay/neuter programs for feral and pet cats so that we can reduce the number of uncared for street cats and help keep pets in their homes. Private money follows public money. City-funded programs would be a catalyst for more private funds, creating the momentum needed to get ahead of the problem. Rescuers are fighting a losing battle against the feline reproductive system. We can solve a big problem now or we can solve a much bigger, much more expensive problem later. There is already an army of volunteers standing by - we just need the spay-neuter appointments that NYC can make possible.
3) Avoid using the phrase TNR or Trap-Neuter-Return
If you’re explaining technical terms, you’re already losing the argument. We’re not just in a feral cat crisis, we’re also in an abandoned pet crisis. Spay-neuter is the solution for both. Keep it simple and focus on city-funded spay-neuter.
4) Cat rescue work in NYC is now a human rights crisis
By neglecting the cat crisis, NYC is engaging in an exploitive arrangement with residents of our most under-resourced communities. If you care about maimed and injured animals, pregnant cats delivering kittens in vacant lots or construction sites with no food sources, animal hoarding, then it becomes your problem to solve. To be clear, this is a municipal problem, a public problem that needs public funds and resources to solve. It should not be offloaded wholesale onto private citizens. We have a sanitation department, police, social services, but there is no Department of Animal Welfare.