Deli Cat, Deli Cat, it's not your fault

The health department has long fought to upset the ecosystem of NYC restaurants, which depend on unpaid feline employees to handle the invading rodent population.

From today's Times:

To Dismay of Inspectors, Prowling Cats Keep Rodents on the Run at City Delis
By KATE HAMMER

Across the city, delis and bodegas are a familiar and vital part of the streetscape, modest places where customers can pick up necessities, a container of milk, a can of soup, a loaf of bread.

Amid the goods found in the stores, there is one thing that many owners and employees say they cannot do without: their cats. And it goes beyond cuddly companionship. These cats are workers, tireless and enthusiastic hunters of unwanted vermin, and they typically do a far better job than exterminators and poisons.

Cats have long had to straddle this balance between food industry savior and pariah.

September 11, 1946
44 RESTAURANT OWNERS FINED $4,955 HERE; ONE HAD 20 CATS ROAMING ABOUT IN KITCHEN

Magistrate Edgar Bromberger and Edward Thompson imposed fines totaling $4,955 yesterday on forty-four restaurant proprietors summoned to Municipal Term Court in the Health Department’s campaign to improve sanitation in New York’s food industry.

The number of fines imposed since the restaurant drive began on June 12 now stands at 863. Adding the day’s penalties to the previous levies brought the total to $83,105 to date. Health Department inspectors have made 5,321 examinations among the city’s 22,000 eating places in the last three months, serving 938 court summonses. Only six defendants have won suspended sentences, and none have been acquitted.

Fines yesterday ranged from $25 to $50. One of the best known restaurants penalized was Poliacoff’s Kosher Restaurant at 121 West Forty-fifth Street, which had 21 allegations against it.

The most unusual of these was that the kitchen was overrun with twenty cats. Hanan Poliacoff, the proprietor, pleaded he kept the cats to prevent rats, but Magistrate Bromberger ruled one cat was enough.

Even some of the city's most famous eateries have sworn by the contribution cats play.

May 28, 1974
ELAINE’S AND 19 OTHER FOOD OUTLETS FLUNK 2D SANITARY INSPECTION

By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.

Elaine's, the popular East Side Restaurant that serves as a club for many of the city’s best-known writers and a showcase for many of its most famous celebrities has been cited by the Department of Health for uncorrected vilations and given until Friday to comply with the department regulations or be closed...

As for the cat citations:

Cat Odor  Explained

As for charges of “cats in the cellar” and “odor of cats throughout cellar,” Mr. Spagnolo, citing the recommendation of the restaurant’s exterminator, insisted it was the cats, particularly the odor of cats, that kept away the rats that had descended on Second Avenue when the old Rupper Brewery was torn down.

Comments

[kimberly kinchen]

Ah, yes, the eternal struggle of deli owners and heads of households alike: cat germs (read:litter box microbes) all over, or rodents using one's home as a supermarket? I vote for cat germs.

[kimberly kinchen]

Eeew. Let me explain...um...cat germs are everywhere, but I'd rather clean the cat germs off the counter top than clean rodent poop off anywhere, etc. etc. Just to clear that up.

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can i just remind everyone that cats are very clean animals.
if those cats are monitored and kept safe by free regular checkups, i dont see the problem as to why they cannot continue to hang at delis. as long as they are kept away from the dining area.

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To date, there are few scientific data available to assess the impact of cat predation on prey populations. Cat numbers in the UK are growing annually and their abundance is far above the ‘natural’ carrying capacity, due to their population sizes being independent of their prey’s dynamics.

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