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Joe Lhota Insists There Are "Literally Thousands Of Cats" In The Subway System
By
Jen Chung
Published Sep 9, 2013
Modified Sep 9, 2013
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By
Jen Chung
Published Sep 9, 2013
Modified Sep 9, 2013
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Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota shocked cat lovers when he said that he wouldn't have stopped subway service to rescue kittens that were on the tracks of a Brooklyn subway station, which basically made him the sociopathic candidate. Now he's trying to backtrack!
Subway service was briefly suspended during "Kittens Gone Wild 2013" (and the cats were found after it was restored; they are chilling at a foster home now), but Lhota's apparently anti-kitten stance gave rival John CATsimatidis an opportunity to rail against Lhota's Grinchy persona. At yesterday's Republican mayoral debate, Lhota insisted, "I never said I wanted to kill a cat," explaining, "I’m not the anti-kitten candidate. We have thousands of cats — literally thousands of cats — that are in the subway system every single day, day and night, scurrying across the tracks, and they don’t get killed."
Thousands of cats in the subway system? It's one thing for there to be feral cats who hang out near tracks, but if there are thousands of cats in the subway system, why haven't we seen more of them? We need some fact-checking on this—and in the mean time, can we mention how cats-as-station masters would be awesome?
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Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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