Of cats and EJK victims

It is not my intention to denigrate or trivialize the concerns, even the umbrage, of cat-loving denizens in Bonifacio Global City. They woke up one day last week and found out that a community of cats which had free run of a park next to the tony Shangri-La at the Fort had suddenly disappeared.

The cats had been “looked after,” though unofficially, by a group of animal lovers led by volunteers working with Cara, or Compassion and Responsibility for Animals Welfare Philippines, the Philippine Pet Birth Control Center (PPBCC), and vet clinics in the area. The cats, they said, were being fed regularly, spayed or neutered, and vaccinated for rabies. The cats were, it was pointed out, a “managed colony.”

So it must have been upsetting for the cat lovers to discover that the felines had disappeared almost overnight, chased and collected by a pest-control firm hired by Shangri-La management to clear the park of the “wayward” felines.

When the cat-loving community of BGC went public with its outrage, Shangri-La management explained that half of the cats were adopted by their own employees, while the rest were “relocated to two locations in Taguig.” Meanwhile, the cat lovers of BGC are said to be looking for “foster parents” for the cats left in the area.

I wish the BGC cat lovers all the luck they need as they attempt to trace the whereabouts of the still-missing cats, and even as they embark on a wider campaign to promote the proper care of pets and even feral or “wild” creatures — including monitoring and control, spaying or neutering, and vaccinations against rabies.

But how I wish all of them — pet owners or animal lovers — could find the same sense of concern, alarm, sadness, and rage expended so generously on a community of cats to other similarly endangered creatures.

I’m talking of the thousands of “Tokhang” and EJK victims and their families who have been gunned down as part of the Duterte administration’s war on drugs. While the shootings and arrests of drug suspects initially raised howls of protest, it seems the wave of outrage in the wake of these tragedies has ebbed, dissipated by the numbing frequency of these killings. This is borne out by the responses in several surveys who either find the violent antidrug operations necessary or justified, and who reiterate their “support” for the Duterte administration. Because surely the campaign against drugs is a cornerstone of the administration’s policy of governance.

We’re not weighing cats versus humans here, to be sure. And I’m fairly sure those who raised a howl over the disappearance of the cats of BGC likewise feel concern, if not anger, over the large numbers of those targeted by antidrug operations.

How I wish the same amount of public compassion, empathy and concern could apply equally to all creatures of God: four-legged or two-legged, cat or criminal suspect, abandoned or loved by family and friends.

The Edsa anniversary this weekend will see a resurgence of the organized protests against not just the antidrug operations, but also against the conduct of governance of the past two years: the antiwoman and antipoor, profanity-laced rhetoric from our President and many of his officials; the emerging climate of corruption, self-indulgence and self-interest among Duterte officials; the abuse of power and intimidation employed against those deemed as enemies of the state.

Toward the end of the Marcos regime, we Filipinos chafed at the comments of foreign observers that we were a nation of cowards unwilling or unable to stand up against a single dictator. We reacted with irritation, if not with a bit of shame, against this perceived insult. That is, until we managed to gather our disparate rage into one powerful expression that exploded with People Power.

We will in a few days remember and commemorate those four days on Edsa that showed the world we had shucked our cowardly skins. We need to stand up now and prove that the heroes of 1986 and the brave millennials that follow are not just alive but also willing to kick butt.