Stu with kitten in The Cat Rescuers (DOC NYC)

This documentary won the Zelda Penzel Giving Voice to the Voiceless Award at the 2018 Hamptons International Film Festival, and it gives viewers a look into just how bad the overpopulation of cats has become—and the very feasible solutions that could curb it within a very short time.

If you live in New York City, you more than likely have noticed there is a massive stray cat problem; the city has an estimated population of 500,000 feral cats. Cats have either left their homes, never to find their way back, or have simply been dumped when their owners moved away.  The average cat fancier may not know this about the furry little YouTube stars but apparently they breed like freaking rabbits. Female cats may become pregnant by several different male cats during the same heat cycle, it only takes two months for them to give birth to a litter, and they can be impregnated again only 30 minutes after giving birth. This is why, if unchecked, feral cat populations can explode in a matter of months.

The film follows four Brooklyn residents who go around trapping as many of these cats as they can. All of the rescuers profiled here are doing this voluntarily, on top of full-time jobs. Sassee, a legal investigator, spends seemingly every waking moment in her off-time sitting in her parked car staking out pregnant cats like a modern-day Captain Ahab. Stu, a radio technician for the fire department, gets up in the predawn hours to feed strays, and he even has turned a storage shed into a neighborhood kennel for wayward cats. Claire, a painter, has dedicated her and her husband’s basement for taking in strays—20 at a time. Tara is a health care administrator who over the course of the film actually buys a new house just to have more room for her strays, and she attributes her sobriety to her passion for rescuing cats.

These rescuers are fighting against the city’s policy of trap and euthanize: cats are held for adoption for a brief period before being put down. The film demonstrates that the alternative, to trap, neuter, and then to return cats to their environments, is proven to stop overpopulation, and with enough funding for manpower, the city could end the overpopulation problem within one generation of cats. While this seems like a no-brainer, the film doesn’t go terribly far into what has caused the city’s inaction. The film implies the problem stems from the public’s ignorance. One random Brooklynite interviewed on the street states that having stray cats around is better than rats. This way of thinking has shades of a certain an old lady who once swallowed a fly and then swallowed a spider to catch the fly….

This isn’t really a laughter matter, though. This is a real problem. The documentary ends on the statistic that there are 40 million feral cats in the United States, only 2 percent of which are spayed or neutered. This is happening everywhere. Cat Rescuers is definitely a recommendation for not only cat-lovers and humanitarians but just about anyone who feels the call to public service.

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