By The Star Staff
The proposal that the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) announced last week to remove hundreds of cats from the Paseo del Morro in Old San Juan over a period of six months “is simply not realistic,” said Ana Maria Salicrup, a spokeswoman for the Save-a-Gato organization.
“Without a doubt, this proposal shows that those who are designing it are totally unaware of the work involved in trapping and removing from their environment cats that are mostly not sociable,” Salicrup said.
The activist said what is being proposed by the federal entity that manages the facilities of the San Felipe del Morro castle also fails in that it does not explain with what resources the strategy will be implemented and where the cats will end up.
“There is an objective reality and that is that most of these cats have not been socialized with humans, which makes their relocation extremely difficult, just as this removal could bring a new problem to the colonial zone,” said Salicrup, who is a lawyer. For the NPS, the hundreds of cats on the Paseo del Morro are an “invasive species” that presents a threat of disease to the citizens and visitors of Old San Juan.
Last week, and in a radio interview with Damaris Suárez on 1320 AM, Salicrup said the worrying situation is what may happen when the area of Old San Juan is filled with rats after their ancestral enemy had been eliminated.
“That is inevitable, an old city, full of restaurants, where all kinds of garbage is generated, added to the population density,” she said. “Naturally those types of pests pose a health risk.”
Noting that the NPS statement was unclear in explaining the requirements for selecting the organization that will ultimately handle the removal and disposal of the cats, Salicrup called for greater transparency in the process.
Meanwhile, poet Vanessa Droz, a member of the steering committee of the Old San Juan Neighborhood Association, previously told the press that “you have to keep in mind that these cats are sterilized and vaccinated by the people of the Save-a-Gato, which has done, for decades, an extraordinary job in Old San Juan.”
At the end of September, the NPS published and opened for comment a revision of the cat management plan in Old San Juan, whose changes included the removal of the felines by an animal welfare organization selected by the federal agency and about which no additional details are available at this time.