The Cats Have People in the Building Now

This week I sat down with the executive director of the City Council's Animal Welfare Caucus and legislative staff from a council member's office to talk about Int. 0830, the bodega cat bill.

If you haven't heard of the caucus, that's because it did not exist until this spring. Its twenty council members represent districts from Staten Island to Brooklyn and meet about animal issues. The new caucus gives these issues a dedicated forum inside the Council.

The caucus is new and still setting its agenda, so I'm glad I had the chance to sit down with them now. I can't tell you where anyone stands on the bill, and that's how it should work. What I can tell you is that they were kind, they had done their reading, and they asked sharp questions.

The bill itself is simple. Right now a cat behind a register is a health code violation. A ticket runs $200 to $300 the first time, and because the cat is technically illegal, the city can't spend a dollar helping it. The city funds neither vaccinations nor spay-and-neuter programs for these cats. The rescues doing that work rely on donations. The bill makes the cats legal, and legal cats can get what the city has never been allowed to give them: free vaccinations and free spay and neuter, delivered through the rescues already doing the work.

Fourteen thousand of you signed the petition that started this. If you haven't yet, everything about the bill is on the advocacy page. Send it to someone who shops at a store with a cat in the window.

The bill sits in the Committee on Health, no hearing scheduled yet. If one gets on the calendar, I'm going to ask you to show up, and I have a feeling some of you will bring signs.

Start thinking about what your sign says.