Cats have become pariahs since the world learned they can be infected by Coronavirus.
Dear Buddy,
Why is everyone so racialist towards cats all of a sudden?
I’ve been doing my regular laps around the block even though all the humans are huddled in their houses, and everyone’s acting like I have the cooties!
Pete the Pomeranian, who is usually one of the friendliest of my neighborhood amigos, ran away from me this morning, while my neighbor’s snooty purebred poodles were more snooty than ever.
There’s a parrot who lives two doors down, and I heard her saying “Get away! Get away, you dirty cat! I don’t want your filthy feline viruses!”
Buddy, what the hell is going on? Why does everyone hate us?
– Freaked Out In Fayetteville
Dear Freaked Out,
You don’t read the newspapers, do you? Ever since a cat in Hong Kong and a tiger here in New York tested positive for the COVID, everyone is acting like us cats are zombies from The Walking Dead!
These days you can’t even claw or pee on a tree to mark your territory without all sorts of dogs, birds and squirrels coming out of the woodwork to yell at you about spreading “the cat AIDS,” as if we’re all infected and trying to spread it to everyone else.
There’s talk of rounding us all up and quarantinizing us in local cat cafes for at least a year. This is America, not Chairman Meow’s communist China!
We’re the lucky ones, my friend. Some cats have been tossed out of their own homes by the same humans who are supposed to serve them. It’s an outrage! The purrsecution and meowlevolent spreading of rumors has gotten out of claw!
For now, the best solution is to disguise yourself as another species entirely. Get some floppy ears and buck teeth and pretend to be a rabbit. And if that parrot keeps talking trash, tell her you haven’t eaten since yesterday and you’re wondering if all birds taste like turkey and chicken, then smile real evil-like. That oughta shut her up. 🙂
Chin up!
– Buddy
PS: Feel free to steal your human’s face masks. As you can see, they’re quite fashionable.
As stray cats suffer, their plight has been mostly overlooked. Cat lovers in cities across the world are trying to keep them fed and safe during the pandemic.
Years ago I worked with a guy who started a food pantry from scratch.
This man, a retired software engineer, approached the biggest restaurants, bakeries and food distributors in the area, asking them to donate their leftover/unused food so his pantry could distribute it to the poor.
Many obliged, but they all had the same request: “Don’t tell anyone we’re participating,” they told him.
The request wasn’t prompted by humility. These businesses didn’t want the public to know how much food they waste, and they waste a lot of perfectly good food, a dirty little secret of the restaurant, hospitality and food industries.
The reason I bring this up is because there’s another demographic that depends on the food those businesses toss out: Stray cats.
With restaurants shuttered because of the Coronavirus, stray cats are going hungry and dying for lack of the scraps they scavenge from rubbish bins, dumpsters and sidewalks. It’s happening here in New York, across the United States, and in countries like Turkey, India, Greece and Morocco.
For animals who already live difficult lives, the pandemic made things worse.
“The strays have no means of feeding themselves as all offices, restaurants [and] roadside eateries are closed,” an animal rights activist in India told the environmental news site Mongabay, in a story headlined ‘Slim pickings for strays and pets during COVID-19 lockdown.’
Cats aren’t the only animals suffering. One particularly dramatic example was caught on video in a Thai city where thousands of long-tailed macaques live and depend on food given to them by tourists.
Hundreds of starving monkeys stopped traffic in a chaotic brawl over a single piece of food, shrieking, clawing and pushing each other aside to get at it.
As if things weren’t bad enough, stray cats are now competing with former house pets for the little food available.
In India, where bad actors have been spreading false information about COVID-19, animal rights activists are finding abandoned pets — including pedigreed cats and dogs — on the streets after their caretakers abandoned them.
“A lot of this is happening because of misinformation that went viral earlier about pets being carriers of the virus in China. It turned out to be fake, of course, but a lot of damage has been done now,” People For Animals’ Vikram Kochhar told Quartz.
Much of the damage has been done on social media, where conspiracy theories and rumors about contracting COVID-19 from animals are rampant. In China, where pet owners abandoned cats and dogs en masse during the first wave of Coronavirus, some social media users on Mandarin-language platforms called for the “extermination” of cats after a pair of studies conducted by Chinese research labs suggested cats are susceptible to catching the virus.
It isn’t easy to combat waves of viral misinformation, even as health authorities across the world stress cats cannot transmit the virus to humans.
In Greece, abandoned pets — many with their collars still on — are following strays to food sources, especially in larger cities like Athens.
“We are seeing an increase in the numbers of cats in areas where we feed, some appear to have been abandoned, while others have roamed far from their usual spots in search of food,” animal welfare advocate Serafina Avramidou told Barron’s.
In feline-loving Turkey, where taking care of street cats is considered a cooperative responsibility, the central government has told local officials to make sure strays are well fed and taken care of. By making it a government responsibility, their thinking goes, citizens who normally care for the cats will be much more likely to stay inside during the pandemic.
“There are lots of cats on the side streets where there are only closed businesses,” a Turkish Twitter user wrote. “I haven’t seen food anywhere for days. The cats are running after us [looking for food].”
In Istanbul, Muazzez Turan fed some 300 stray cats daily before the pandemic, but said she’s had to stay home: Not only has her country been particularly hard hit by COVID-19, but she has pre-existing medical problems that make her susceptible to complications should she contract the virus.
Still, she said, her mind “was always with the cats,” and she told Turkish news agency Anadolu that she was relieved to hear the strays hadn’t been forgotten.
“I will sleep peacefully for the first time today,” Turan said.
LaTonya Walker of Brooklyn feeds a stray in Canarsie. Credit: 24 Cats Per Second
Here in New York, some animal lovers are picking up the slack for closed restaurants as well as at-risk people who normally feed strays.
Among them is Latonya Walker, who told the New York Post she normally spends $600 a month feeding several colonies of strays but expects her costs this month will be “way more since there’s less restaurant garbage they can eat from, and more hungry cats walking around.”
“The cats have no clue what’s going on because nothing has changed for them,” Walker said. “It’s not in my DNA to see a cat suffering and not do anything about it. I’m equipped to make a cat’s life better, so I’m going to.”
The Los Gatos gain an edge while feigning concern for their customers. Meanwhile, Buddy has disappeared.
NEW YORK — Touting its concern for catnip junkies and the nip-slingers who deal to them, the Los Gatos criminal gang became the latest organization to issue social distancing guidelines on Thursday.
The new guidelines represent the gang’s effort “to find new and innovative ways to deliver quality narcotics to our customers,” the gang said in a statement after veterinary authorities announced cats are susceptible to COVID-19.
“The safety and health of our drug dealers is of the utmost importance in the trying days ahead of us,” said the cartel, which deals almost exclusively in catnip and silver vine. “However, our dealers serve a vital function in our communities, not unlike pharmacies, and must remain in business for the benefit of cats who need the good stuff.
“That’s why we’ve implemented contact-less nip transactions, allowing our customers to get their fix without exposing themselves to the possibility of infection,” the notice read. “Users can visit our website or download our app to place orders. Use promo code BUDDYISAWIMP to get 20 percent off your first order of Meowie Wowie or Purrple Haze!”
The Buddy Organization, Los Gatos’ primary rival in the catnip distribution industry, has yet to respond or offer its own social distance policy.
Sources inside the organization say Buddy himself has been missing for days, with rampant speculation that the gray tabby has been hiding under his human’s bed since learning cats can contract the Coronavirus.
“That COVIDIOT has left us high and dry while the Los Gatos are muscling in on our territory,” one exasperated source complained. “Sales are down 73 percent over the last week and he’s nowhere to be seen!”
A spokescat for Buddy denied the reports.
“That’s ridiculous and frankly offensive,” the spokescat said. “Buddy is absolutely not scared of garbage trucks, paper bags, vacuum cleaners or toddlers, and he sure as heck isn’t scared of Coronavirus. He doesn’t even drink beer.”
Sales of catnip have been booming as cats and humans alike self-isolate and self-medicate.
With news of the first infected cat comes panic and misinformation that could prove deadly to our loyal little friends.
Cats have been a Godsend in this era of social distancing.
People are looking for something — anything — to get their minds off grim reality and the repetitive, depressing 24/7 virus coverage that dominates television.
Cats have delivered. Our furry friends have been covering themselves in glory, providing an endless supply of viral videos and making people smile just by being their endearing, quirky selves.
Most of all they’ve been there for us at home, soothing anxieties and lowering blood pressure with each lap they claim and each affectionate nuzzle. We may be isolated from other people, but when there’s a cat in the house you never feel truly alone. (If for nothing else, their meows at meal time will make sure of that.)
For me it’s not even a question: Without my Buddy, I’d be slipping into depression of a kind that can’t be cured with Netflix bingeing, books or games.
Little Buddy the Cat on March 27, 2020.
Now we’ve got to return the favor and protect our cats.
The first “confirmed” case of a cat contracting COVID-19 has come from Belgium, where a veterinary lab ran tests on a sick cat with respiratory problems and concluded the cat picked up the virus from her human.
“The cat lived with her owner, who started showing symptoms of the virus a week before the cat did,” said Steven Van Gucht, a public health official in Belgium, according to the Brussels Times. “The cat had diarrhea, kept vomiting and had breathing difficulties. The researchers found the virus in the cat’s feces.”
This is not good news.
Medical diagnostic labs in the US have tested thousands of pets for COVID-19 and haven’t found a single infected animal.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly said there is no evidence of dogs or cats serving as hosts for the virus or infecting humans, although that organization has killed its own credibility with its effusive praise for the Chinese government, and by parroting Chinese insistence that the virus couldn’t be transmitted from human to human. (WHO continued telling the world there was no evidence of contagion through late January, some six weeks after it was clear the virus was multiplying.)
The deadly consequences of misinformation
Unfortunately that didn’t stop innumerable people from abandoning their cats and dogs in China, leaving them in apartments and houses to starve. One Chinese animal welfare group, which is partnered with Humane Society International, says “tens of thousands” of pets were abandoned.
Some Chinese territories instructed people to kill their pets, and there are sickening reports of people clubbing defenseless animals to death in the streets.
That may not be surprising in China, which has an abominable record on human and animal rights, but now there are disturbing reports from all over the world. Shelter operators in the UK, for instance, say they’re fielding calls from people who want to abandon their pets because of the Coronavirus.
“Mostly, it’s people who haven’t got access to the right information online,” Claire Jones, who works at a shelter in Stoke-on-Trent, told the BBC. “It’s a nightmare.”
Misinformation and confusion are compounding the problem, the result of a new media ecosystem in which news is whatever a person’s social circle posts on their feeds and news consumers don’t distinguish between reliable press outlets (Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Reuters, etc) and the thousands of less scrupulous sites masquerading as legitimate sources of news.
Thus, when a dog in China tested positive for trace elements of Coronavirus — but blood tests were negative — sites like Quartz wasted no time pumping out headlines declaring that dogs and cats can be infected.
Exercising caution with information
It looks like the Belgium case is another in which fact and nuance are sacrificed for clicks. Belgian virologist Hans Nauwynck is among the skeptics who believe veterinary authorities in his country acted too rashly.
“Before sending this news out into the world, I would have had some other tests carried out,” Nauwynck told the Brussels Times.
To confirm the positive test, the lab used a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. A PCR test “allows scientists to multiply a very small sample of genetic material to produce a quantity large enough to study,” the Times noted. But the test only confirmed that the cat suffered from a flu-like virus. It did not specifically match the viral infection with COVID-19.
“A clear link between virus excretion and clinical signs cannot be established, in part because other possible causes for the cat’s illness were not excluded,” wrote Ginger Macaulay, a veterinarian in Lexington, South Carolina.
In addition, authorities didn’t rule out the possibility that the sample was contaminated or maintain a forensic chain of possession that would ensure it was properly handled.
“I would advise people to slow down,” Nauwynck said. “There may somehow have been genetic material from the owner in the sample, and so the sample is contaminated.”
To be absolutely certain, he said, more tests should have been done to confirm the initial result, and certainly before making an announcement to the world. Veterinary authorities should have tested for the presence of antibodies in the cat’s system as well, he said, which is a sign that an immune system is fighting off an infection.
“I’m worried that people will be scared by this news and animals will be the ones to suffer, and that’s not right. As scientists we ought to put out clear and full information, and I don’t think that has happened.”
With reports about the infected cat spreading across the globe — and adding to existing fears — the Belgian virologist said panic could override reason, with catastrophic consequences for our little feline friends.
“I wouldn’t wish to be a cat tomorrow.”
A cat on a lead in China is protected with a face mask. Credit: AsiaWire
Pain In The Bud 