I read Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats by Courtney Gustafson when it was released in April this year, and I felt myself thinking deeply about the intersections between class, labor, and human/animal welfare. And how can I not? People are so inextricably wound up in the animals they own, the animals they care for, the animals they feed. All types of people have pets, all types of people are struggling, and all types of already struggling people would gladly feed their cats before they feed themselves. In a recent post to her Instagram page @poetssquarecats, Gustafson writes about her frustration with the worsening criminalization of homeless people in Tucson, Arizona. At the end of her caption, she describes exactly the aforementioned situation: a man who prioritizes his cats over himself. She writes, “The last photo is the pantry of a man we helped [get basic necessities] last year. All cat food, exactly one can of food for himself. We have to do better than this.”
Cats, Money & Labor
In her book Poets Square, Gustafson astutely points out the connections between money, cats, the haves, and the have-nots. She writes:
Money determines everything: whether cats get basic vet care, whether they have steady meals, whether they’ll live indoors and sleep in soft beds or reproduce in dark alleys, searching dumpsters for scraps. There are pet cats and there are stray cats and sometimes they feel like two distinct social classes of the same species… One of the community cat programs I started volunteering with keeps a map of the city, little cat-shaped pins dropped at every address where there are large numbers of cats living outdoors. The patterns are obvious: the clusters of pins are very clearly in the poorer neighborhoods.
In the U.S., stray and feral cats often overpopulate and continuously reproduce unchecked not just in lower income neighborhoods, but also in households with limited or inadequate access to medical care. In a case local to me from earlier this year, over 100 cats were found in a single bedroom in a Central New York home. When asked for a comment, Courtney Armbruster, the vice president of one of the organizations that assisted in rehoming the cats, said, “I don’t believe the owners were attempting to be cruel. They weren’t trying to be negligent, they were just overwhelmed.” In Central New York, where a gallon of milk still costs less than $3 and a starting salary at a prestigious institution like Syracuse University is $17/hour before taxes, it costs an average of $100 to spay a female cat and $85 to neuter a male cat. And this is not to say that these services should cost less or that any veterinarian practice is to blame. But realistically, people living paycheck to paycheck or having to work multiple jobs to stay afloat are not going to have enough money or time to get their animals the care they need and deserve. And that’s a systemic problem.
The cruelty and dismissal with which our society treats our most vulnerable populations — the elderly, children, the disabled, the homeless — are a direct reflection of our society’s values and what or who it values. And I think this observation can be extended to the animals we care for (like cats). Even in our current sociopolitical climate (and maybe especially so), we can connect human welfare to cat welfare. An undiscussed side of the ICE raids occurring daily in the U.S. includes the pets that the deported families cared for. These previously loved pets often end up in shelters, if not abandoned and left to fend for themselves due to the abruptness of their families’ kidnapping. And although shelters state explicitly that keeping a pet with their family is the ideal situation (for the psychological state of both the family and the animal, and for the logistical challenges that come with a sudden influx of animals in local shelters), deported families are not allowed to take their pets with them when they are forcibly expelled from the U.S.
Barring any pre-planned intra-community or intra-familial adoptions (the best case scenario), that leaves 1) shelters reeling with another operational nightmare on top of their already overwhelming amount of work, 2) traumatized animals being shipped between shelters, vets, and fosters to provide care and (hopefully) rehome them, and 3) heartbroken families dealing with another monumental loss on top of the loss of their homes and communities.
And in the midst of all of this, we can clearly see who (and what) our society values: “correct”, productive labor. In other words, labor that is not produced by primarily poor, disabled, Black and brown, or queer populations. These populations’ work is not considered important or good, regardless of the actual impact of their work on our day to day lives. And ICE has primarily targeted undocumented immigrants and formerly incarcerated peoples, populations that are decidedly not ‘correct’ or ‘correctly productive’. In a recent press release, the Department of Homeland Security claims that ICE aims to arrest “the worst of the worst” and “illegal aliens… [who] have been charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S.” In light of these ICE raids, A. Naomi Paik’s delineation of the role neoliberalism has played in our society’s scapegoating and criminalization of Black and brown immigrants comes to mind. In the introduction of her book Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary, Paik writes, “This cultural project [of neoliberalism] not only encourages people to adopt market values as their social values (for example, efficiency or productivity), but also depends on intensifying social differences in race, gender, citizenship status, class, and so on.” Sound familiar at all?
More to the point, what does our society’s ongoing criminalization of Black and brown populations say about the type of labor it values and who it considers fully human, and therefore fully worthy of dignity, fully valuable? Our society certainly cannot consider those same Black and brown communities it demonizes and dehumanizes to be fully human, even while simultaneously extracting an enormous amount of labor from them.
Reclaiming Animality and Spiting Neoliberal Productivity
So what does it mean for us to continue to care for cats in all of this? I think there’s a few ways we can answer that question.
In Toward a Decolonial Feminism, Maria Lugones writes of the colonial categorization of BIPOC as animals:
Beginning with the colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean, a hierarchical, dichotomous distinction between human and non-human was imposed on the colonized in the service of Western man… This distinction became a mark of the human and a mark of civilization. Only the civilized are men or women. Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africans were classified as not human in species — as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild.
This passage made me question what I previously felt was a clear distinction between humans and animals. It also made me shudder with its poignancy and relevance to contemporary American media. These colonial roots have spawned branches in our media landscape, where queer people, disabled people, and people of color are not only regularly de-humanized, but animal-ized and monstro-sized. Think of the trans-centered slasher hit Sleepaway Camp (1983), where the killer is not only a trans girl, but the most monstrous and feared thing about her is not her murderous tendencies, but instead her female penis. The murderer’s inability to neatly conform to her perceived gender is a key mechanism of the fear she inspires. Or take the popular imagination of the zombie, a monster whose monstrosity innately stems from its inability (or disability). In his paper Lurching for the Cure?, Mel Y. Chen discusses zombie portrayal in media as a mirror for the disabled, “a rehearsal of cognitive and physical disability in their specific movements, their cognitive fog, their labile moods, their missing limbs.”
I have to tell you now that a majority of the people I’ve met working in animal welfare have been queer people, disabled people, people of color, and/or women. What does it mean when these specific groups of people, who are so often maligned as being animal-like and monstrous, choose to care for the animals they are often mocked as resembling? When we (the Other, the inhuman) choose to enact care for the non-human/animal, are we attempting to decolonize and reclaim our non-human selves? Am I hoping to reclaim some of my own humanity and animality through my care for cats?
We can also look at the question of animal care through the lens of neoliberalism. Pets, and cats especially, are not generally considered valuable, productive members of society. I mean, they don’t work and they don’t make money. Not to mention, a lot of animals exist outside of or alongside human systems without fully integrating — like stray or feral cats, for example. Cats in particular have often been villainized and mocked for their ‘lack of obedience and affection’. Essentially, they cannot be easily trained and used by authorities like police or the military the same way dogs can.
Take, for example, the use of German Shepherds as drug and weapons detecting dogs in K9 units versus the lack of cat units being employed by those same authorities. And let’s not get it twisted—it wasn’t for a lack of trying. In the 1960s, the CIA explored the idea of using cats as tools of espionage, wired up with cameras and microphones with the intention of infiltrating interactions with Soviet agents. Although the technology worked, the cats refused to. Cats have since acquired the label of being ‘‘unproductive’ and ‘defiant’ due to their perceived untrainability for human use, which has become a shorthand for ‘unworthy of the same level of care and attention as dogs’. And the numbers back this up. Until 5 years ago, dogs accounted for over 50% of live community outcomes in shelters and rescues across the U.S. This means dogs made up over 50% of the total animals (dogs and cats) in shelters and rescues that survived and were adopted, returned to their owners, returned to their communities, etc. By contrast, in that same time, cats made up over 50% of non-live outcomes (death to euthanasia, lost and died in care, etc.) in shelters and rescues across the U.S.
This leads me to Jina B. Kim’s article, Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique, where she advocates for a refusal of neoliberalism’s “[equating of] productivity and work with one’s life worth” and a re-evaluation of our society’s tendency to automatically center/champion able-bodied people and those who are ‘correctly productive’. What, then, does providing care for cats mean in the context of neoliberal ideas of worthiness? What does it mean to provide care, to spend our finite resources, on a population of animals that are explicitly defined by their unusefulness, their unproductivity? And what does it mean for us to understand all of that stigma and provide care in spite of it? My insistence on dignity, survival, and inherent worthiness for ‘unproductive’ cats in a world that discards and systematically devalues them is fundamentally rooted in my insistence on dignity, survival, and inherent worthiness for ‘unproductive’ people in a system that continuously animal-izes and monstro-sizes them.
An Abolitionist Sanctuary for Cats and Humans Alike
So where do we go from here? What are we supposed to do with all of this? Well, radical hope and imagination are and have been used as feminist, decolonial tools for generations for a reason. I think we need to imagine and then build a better world and a better system for cats and humans alike. Here, I think it is useful to return to A. Naomi Paik. Later on in Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary, Paik defines ‘abolitionist sanctuary’ as an idea that “connects sanctuary’s radical welcome, its judgment-free embrace of anyone, to abolition, defined as social justice organizing that seeks to tear down oppressive power structures like prison systems and build a just, equitable world in their place.”
What is a shelter if not an abolitionist sanctuary for animals? What are shelter workers advocating for if not the total acceptance of and care for all animals, regardless of background, ability, and money? How can we use the examples set by animal shelters to expand our own understanding of compassionate care and acceptance regardless of human background, ability, and money? I want us to imagine an abolitionist sanctuary for humans that follows in Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories of the borderlands and mestiza consciousness, one that surpasses normative ideas of belonging and recalibrates our binary understanding of citizenship. What does a world look like where — like cats who are accepted in shelters regardless of what neighborhood they come from, what they look like, their temperaments, or histories — we have spaces that welcome and care for people regardless of what nation or community they come from or are cast out from, what they can or cannot produce, or their histories, lineages, and ethnicities?
References I Couldn’t Link But You Should Read:
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Chen, Mel Y. “Lurching for the Cure?: On Zombies and the Reproduction of Disability.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21 no. 1, 2015, p. 24–31.
Gustafson, Courtney. Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats. Random House, 29 Apr. 2025.
Lugones, María. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia, vol. 25, no. 4, 2010, pp. 742–59.
Paik, A. Naomi. Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration in the Twenty-First Century. Oakland, California University Of California Press, 2020.