According to Vice, the Rio spendathon did some good for dogs and cats:
… Ferriera, who works with the Rio Olympics Sustainability Department, was there to help them. Danielle Bambace of World Animal Protection’s Brazil chapter, who was also there to document the captures, told me Maracana is not a safe place for cats. Some local soccer fans consider them bad omens. Both fans and stadium workers have been known to kill cats if they see them on game day, sometimes in particularly brutal fashion; Bambace said that when they first came to inspect the area, they found about 60 dead cats around the stadium. Also, the cats breed quickly here. Before the Olympics, there were some 100 cats outside the stadium. Within a few months, Bambace estimates, there could be five or six hundred.
Ferriera trapped 10 cats that night. All will be spayed and neutered, and any that need veterinary care will receive it before being released back into a special cat area inside Maracana’s grounds equipped with play areas that will hopefully keep them safe even after the Olympics are over.
Ferriera has had his eye on this cat colony for years, but the money has never been available to properly deal with it in a humane way. Because of this, Ferriera feels like one of the athletes competing at the Olympics, at least in the sense that he, too, has been waiting for many years to achieve a goal he’s had for a long time. “Without the Olympics,” he said, “it wouldn’t happen.”…
Back in November, Rosângela Ribeiro, the veterinary programs director for World Animal Protection (WAP), emailed the Rio 2016 sustainability department wanting to know what they planned to do with stray dogs and cats found during construction of Rio’s venues. She only had domestic animals in mind, but within a few hours, the sustainability department invited her to a meeting. Ribeiro met with the department for four hours, asking them what they planned to do. As she remembers it, they told her that they had no real plan.
Over the ensuing months, WAP worked with the organizers to create a comprehensive plan to humanely handle wildlife and domestic animals found at the venues, as well as addressing long-standing stray issues near venues like the one at Maracana. Rio 2016 doesn’t pay WAP anything, but the organizers cover the costs for trapping, spaying/neutering, and veterinary care…
At WAP’s recommendation, the sustainability department hired biologist Guilherme Andreoli to be the point of contact for all animal-related issues at venues. During an adoption event for the many good dogs rescued at Olympic venues in Barra da Tijuca last Saturday, Andreoli told me about the time he recently had to dive into a pool and put a feisty capybara in a headlock to remove it from the water. Not long after, he got a call alerting him to an alligator in a tent at the golf course, but he was waiting to hear if it was a “small, not a problem” alligator, as he put it, or a bigger, more worrying one…
Apart from warm fuzzies (however temporary), what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Monday Evening Open Thread: Olympic BlessingPost + Comments (66)