The Israeli cat transfer scheme

The Israeli cat transfer scheme

Yuval Avivi, Al Monitor Israel Pulse, 27 March 2016

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/03/israel-transfer-street-cats-minister-ariel-sterilization.html

Yuval Avivi, journalist and literary critic, is a columnist for the magazine Firma (of the Israeli economic daily Globes group) and writes for TimeOut Tel Aviv magazine. He was previously deputy chief editor of the Israeli daily Israel HaYom weekend supplement.

This was one of the strangest episodes to emerge from the Israeli government, and in a country where reality sometimes exceeds all imagination, it’s no easy competition. Israeli Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel (HaBayit HaYehudi) decided last November not to pass the budget for spaying and neutering stray cats — a policy experts agree is effective in diminishing their reproduction. Ariel thought that the process violates the Jewish belief that forbids causing pain to animals. Cats in Israel surely breathed a sigh of relief at the minister’s unwillingness to snip their private parts, but the nation of cats certainly wasn’t prepared for the alternatives he proposed. In a letter he sent to Avi Gabbay, the minister of environmental protection, Ariel proposed using the funds for one of two alternatives: research on alternatives to the invasive procedure or — and this is the strange part of the whole story — using “the budget to deport stray dogs and/or cats of one sex (all the males or all the females) to a foreign country that agrees to accept them.” The Israeli public didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and immediately dubbed the episode “the Cat Transfer Plan.”http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/03/israel-transfer-street-cats-minister-ariel-sterilization.html