Cats have been in the news quite frequently here in the US, given the ugly attack on “childless cat ladies” from Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, and it feels even more timely with Thursday being International Cat Day. But in San Juan, Puerto Rico, cats are under attack in a battle that has been ongoing since the United States National Park Service announced plans for the removal of the cats in its Paseo del Morro historic site.
The cats of San Juan have been a tourist attraction for years, and many people in the community have cared for them and fed them. Some of the cats “are believed to be descendants of colonial-era cats, while others were brought to the capital by legendary San Juan Mayor Felisa Rincón de Gautier to kill rats in the mid-20th century.”
In many ways, the attacks on these cats reflect how many Puerto Ricans feel their existence is being threatened as they are being priced out. The cats have struck an emotional chord.
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This video produced by Alley Cat Allies, a nonprofit from Maryland, covers the history of the cats of San Juan and the organization’s efforts to stop the cats from being removed and euthanized, a plan announced by the NPS in late 2023. The NPS plan dismisses the longstanding Trap-Neuter-Return efforts that have been practiced by organizations like Save a Gato, a group has been doing such work for almost 20 years.
Alley Cat Allies sued the NPS in March in federal court to try and stop the cat removal plan.
The issue with the San Juan cats is that it can make the area unsanitary, and getting rid of the cats can be an issue because some of them are difficult to catch and too feral to adopt. Additionally, it’s that more cats keep appearing.
The NY Times reported: “In Puerto Rico, there are so many abandoned animals,” Ms. [Irma] Podestá said. “It’s a never-ending story.” Podesta works with Save a Gato.
The NY Times also explained “The number of abandoned animals on the island surged after Hurricane Maria in 2017, when many Puerto Ricans lost their homes. Amid natural disasters and economic uncertainty, Puerto Rico’s population shrank by about 12 percent from 2010 to 2020; the island now has about 3.2 million people, many of whom have struggled to keep up the rising cost of housing in particular.”
And there is also the issue of how invasive the cats are, as reported in this Noema article:
Yet to ecologists, these kitties are one of the world’s most dangerous invasive species. Félix López, cultural resources program manager at the San Juan National Historic Site, which includes the Paseo, told me the ongoing presence of more than 100 feral cats along the walkway prevents the park from conserving wildlife and the natural habitat there as it’s mandated to do.
“We should not be feeding animals in any national park site,” López says. “This is not right for the animal, not right for the environment and this is not right for us.”
But the desire to keep the cats is about more than the feelings of cat lovers or the long historical tie the cats have to the area. It represents something bigger around history and displacement:
San Juaneros feed them. Tourists snap their pictures. But probably not for much longer: The federal agency that manages the fortress and the land around it wants the cats gone, saying that they are a nuisance and could be carrying disease.
Puerto Rico, a United States territory plagued by financial troubles and natural disasters, has bigger things to worry about. But the plan to remove close to 200 cats from Old San Juan — a neighborhood of San Juan that was the first place on the island settled by the Spanish — has struck an emotional chord at a time when many Puerto Ricans feel like they, too, are in danger of being pushed from their homes.
The reasons differ — for the people, it is investors snapping up properties and pushing up rents and home prices — yet in Old San Juan, the two stories could ultimately share the same ending: a beloved neighborhood so changed that, at least some longtime residents fear, it will have lost its soul.
“This town may end up like an empty shell,” said Rei Segurola, 72, who wonders whether he should move out of Old San Juan. “It may end up with a lot of facades, like Disney or Epcot or Las Vegas.”
Puerto Rican poet, author and academic David M. de León has written the epic poem “The Cats of Old San Juan” with the cats as a metaphor for the history of colonialism on the island, and the sterilization of the cats as a symbol of the sterilization of women in Puerto Rico. Here is just a little bit of it:
The cats of Old San Juan are not native though they were born here.
They are not native though being native is not a measure of belonging.
The cats are here because of the rats.
The rats are here because of the Americans.
The Americans were here because of the Spanish.
The Spanish were here because fuck the Spanish.
*
[...]
Save-a-Gato manages the colony of cats.
They manage the colony through a strategy of TNR.
TNR stands for “trap, neuter, release.”
This is considered humane.
It was the alternative to being euthanized.
Being euthanized was also considered humane.
*
“Humane” is from Latin.
It means “to act like a human.”
*
[...]
Puerto Rico is managed by the US.
*
Clarence Gamble, of the Proctor and Gamble family, set up twenty-two birth control clinics on the island in the 1930s.
These clinics practiced sterilization.
The sterilizations were either voluntary or not.
Clarence Gamble was a eugenicist.
Clarence Gamble wanted to breed out poor people.
Puerto Ricans are a poor people.
I hope you will read the whole poem.
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