New York City’s real animal welfare crisis isn’t the Westminster Dog Show | Westminster Dog Show

EEvery February, the Westminster Dog Show comes to New York, with equal parts pageantry, nostalgia and protest. The dogs come to be judged. Owners and masters come to enforce breed standards. And, almost as reliable as the film references and the best of the series ribbon, Peta arrives ready to dominate the conversation.

If there is one certainty about the dog Super Bowl, it is that protest will share the stage with pageantry. Westminster is an annual clash of tradition, spectacle and dissent, and Peta has become exceptionally good at making this moment her own. This year was no different. Two huge billboards were deployed across the street from the Javits Center, where race judging took place Monday and Tuesday before the prime-time sessions at Madison Square Garden. A reading: Dogs with flat faces have difficulty breathing. NEVER buy them. Another: You can get a nose job. They can’t. DO NOT purchase breeds with respiratory problems.

Provocative billboards, mobile ads, media hooks, message discipline: Peta is very, very good at this. And to be clear: criticism of extreme dog breeding and conformation standards is legitimate and necessary. But that moral clarity gets murkier and quicker when the conversation shifts from purebred dogs to cats.

Because when it comes to cats, Peta’s message increasingly relies on a selective scientific framework, strategic ambiguity, and an unwillingness to recognize the logical end point of her own philosophy. This ambiguity allows the organization to criticize local rescuers while avoiding the political and ethical toxicity of openly supporting mass euthanasia policies. One of the clearest examples is his continued criticism of trap-neuter-return (TNR) programs, with claims – widely disputed by rescue communities and many veterinarians – that TNR encourages abandonment because people assume outdoor cats will be “taken care of.”

The argument collapses even upon casual contact with reality. Most people don’t abandon their pets by chance. For most families, pets are members of the family. When financial hardship forces someone to choose between housing, feeding their children, paying medical bills, or caring for a veterinarian, these are traumatic decisions, not moral failures. The main driver of unchanged cat populations is not indifference but access. The fact is that affordable sterilization services remain out of reach in many communities.

But right behind affordability is something less visible and almost as consequential: education. It’s remarkable how many people living with unsterilized cats simply don’t know what spaying and neutering actually does: reduce spraying, aggression, and homelessness. In many cases, people do not reject responsible care. They simply don’t realize that there is a practical, human intervention that can turn an overwhelming situation into a manageable one.

Yet Peta’s messages often veer toward a kind of performative responsibility checklist: Cats must be spayed or neutered, vaccinated, licensed, microchipped, and kept indoors. Which is, in theory, correct. It also makes no sense without asking the obvious questions that arise: who pays, with what money and where are these services actually accessible? Discussions about outdoor disease risks also tend to omit key context. Yes, outdoor cats are at high risk of disease. But two of the most devastating viruses in outdoor populations – feline leukemia virus (FeLV) and feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) – are strongly linked to mating and reproduction. Sterilization directly reduces these transmission routes, which is of course the central mechanism of TNR. Ignoring this context creates a narrative that appears scientifically based while circumventing the most practical intervention tool available.

The uncomfortable reality is that New York City didn’t just develop a stray cat problem, it actually manufactured one. The price crisis in the city has caused an animal welfare crisis. People don’t choose between being responsible and irresponsible; they have to choose between categories of survival: rent, food, health care, child care, transportation – and sometimes, yes, animal care loses out. Estimates place New York City’s outdoor cat population well above 500,000, and the burden of this population is not evenly distributed. It is heavily concentrated in low-income neighborhoods and outlying communities, where access to veterinary care is already limited and residents are more likely to manage multiple levels of economic precarity simultaneously.

More than half of pet owners in the United States report struggling to afford basic veterinary visits, and this pressure has been compounded by the rapid corporatization of veterinary medicine. Large companies — including Mars Inc, which owns Banfield, VCA and BluePearl — now control a massive share of the U.S. veterinary market, up dramatically from less than a decade ago. Prices have risen, staff shortages have worsened, and access has become more unequal. When humans face food and housing insecurity, their animals suffer too. This is not about moral decadence. It’s a question of economics, and pretending otherwise only distracts political discussions from solutions.

In this context, TNR is not so much utopian animal activism as it is harm reduction. Outdoor cat breeding is brutally efficient: females can become pregnant at four months of age, gestation lasts about 65 days, and queens can become pregnant again while nursing. Kittens compete aggressively for limited food and estimates suggest that up to 90% of kittens born outside never survive. Street mating is also a primary vector of disease, with transmission of FeLV and FIV strongly linked to reproduction and close contact with the mother. Sterilization interrupts both population growth and the spread of major diseases. Removal-only strategies have repeatedly failed wherever they have been tried on a large scale without sterilization saturation. Killing cats without addressing reproduction simply creates a void that new, unsterilized cats quickly fill.

In contrast, TNR stabilizes populations, reduces harmful behavior, reduces shelter intake pressure, and improves overall colony health. This doesn’t create perfection but it does mean less animal suffering. Talk to the people who actually do this work – full-time volunteers, parents, teenagers, retirees – and you’ll hear the same thing. The blocks change. Territorial fights are decreasing. Spraying is decreasing. The endless cycle of dead litters slows down. Neighborhoods are stabilizing. And yet, these volunteers are frequently mocked or dismissed by organizations with far larger platforms, deeper pockets, and greater public influence.

If New York wants a serious solution, it’s not glamorous, but it is extremely effective: universal access to spaying and neutering subsidized by the city. Frame it however you want. It works across all political angles. It is a public health policy aimed at reducing the burden of disease and environmental pressures. This is an animal welfare policy, which consists of reducing the number of animals born in conditions of extreme suffering. And it’s a fiscal policy that reduces the number of shelters, euthanasia costs, and emergency medical expenses over time. Pair this with sustained public education – explaining why sterilization is important, where services are available and how communities can participate – and you will begin to address the root causes rather than the symptoms.

There are also more difficult cultural conversations. Cities that have created a massive overflow of shelters while maintaining a retail pipeline of new animals deserve scrutiny. Working cats, including beloved bodega cats, can be ingrained in culture. But without enforceable social norms, tradition can easily become neglected. None of this is anti-animal. It’s pro-reality.

Peta is right on one crucial point: the streets are not freedom. The outdoor life of domestic cats is often short, violent and filled with disease. Outdoor cats also devastate local bird populations and ecosystems. But moral clarity requires consistency. If you want to claim a high ethical stance when it comes to animal suffering, you can’t pick and choose which animals make better viral billboards. Dogs deserve to be protected from abusive breeding. Cats deserve to be protected from political debates based on half-said conclusions. And cities like New York don’t need more slogans. They need access to sterilization, reduced costs and sustained public education.

Bob Barker used to sign off every episode of The Price Is Right with the same message: help control the pet population, have your pets spayed or neutered. No billboards. No outrage cycle. Just a simple, evidence-based solution, repeated often enough to matter. Animal welfare could benefit more.

• Lauren Caulk is the founder and president of Ocean Hill Cats, a nonprofit cat rescue organization based in Brooklyn.