6 APRIL 17-23, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS Parks and Wildlife Department says in a document explaining the organization’s po- sition on TNR programs. “Additionally, TNR programs are not effective at alleviating the threats of feral and free-roaming cat colo- nies on feline health, human health or native wildlife populations.” For a property owner who manages prop- erties used for residential, retail and restau- rant purposes, the potential threat to human health that stray cats could pose is especially worrisome to Spence. The Bishop Arts cat colonies tend to congregate in alleys behind the neighborhood’s restaurants, and Spence said he’s concerned about the risk animal ex- crement, especially in a concentrated area, could pose to the nearby human traffic. Moreover, many of the buildings in Bishop Arts are old, historic homes that are hard to make critter-proof. Crawl spaces un- derneath the properties are inviting homes for any number of mammals, and Spence said he has had to combat two flea infesta- tions in residential properties where he maintained a no-pet policy because of stray cats living under the homes. “I have a certain obligation to my tenants. I have a contractual obligation, particularly in buildings that have food service opera- tions or that have residential functions, to control the pests in that area, whether they’re a mosquito or a badger,” Spence said. “I can’t just shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Well, sorry about the flea infestation.’” A Sentimental Divide D allas Animal Services data shows that in the 2024-2025 fiscal year so far, 173 cats have been treated as part of the TNR program. At the end of the last fiscal year, nearly 350 cats had been neu- tered, vaccinated and re-released onto Dal- las’ streets. That is hundreds of cats on Dallas’ streets that, just two decades ago, would have faced euthanasia at the animal shelter, rather than medical care. An Observer article from 2011 describes our city’s shift in thinking on this topic when Dallas police chief-turned-may- oral candidate David Kunkle declared his in- tention to make Dallas a “no-kill city.” While Kunkle didn’t win his election, the city agreed with his position as, at that point, close to 75% of all animals taken into the shelter were being put down. This is the part where, if Spence and Dennis weren’t seeing eye to eye before, their backs fully turn on each other. Spence believes that the city’s decision to get out of the business of stray euthanasia has left property owners burdened with an “impos- sible situation.” When he bought his first property in Oak Cliff, he was taught by a neighboring businessman that pest control didn’t need to be any more complicated than buying a trap from Elliot’s Hardware and taking care of business. Twenty-nine years later, his feelings on the matter haven’t changed, even as the cul- ture surrounding animal welfare has. “You’d get a cat trap, you’d put some cat food in it, you’d catch the cat and then you’d take it to Animal Services, which at that point was a humble little building. It was called Animal Control, and it was next to the zoo,” Spence said. “And I said, ‘So just out of curiosity, how did you get the cat out of that trap?’ They said, ‘Oh, we have a very long needle.’ So back in those days, that was how animal control was done. Stray animals were unsentimentally put down. Humanely, but unsentimentally.” To Dennis, this is an admission of evil. Outside of Dallas, some cities are begin- ning to consider the legal gray area that feral cat colonies operate in. In New York City, animal advocacy groups are rallying around a call to decriminalize the cats living in the city’s bodegas and corner stores. It is cur- rently illegal in New York state to allow an animal to live in a food-selling shop, and owners can face fines if caught by inspec- tors. Fans of the cats argue they’re useful for chasing off rodents or cockroaches. And, they just make people happy. Dahlke, the Bishop Arts bar owner, told the Observer as much. “In Bishop Arts, our cats are part of the fabric of the community,” she said. On the other hand, small-town Strasburg, Ohio, located South of Cleveland, approved an ordinance last year that bans anyone other than caretakers registered with the city from feeding or sheltering stray cats. The ordi- nance came after residents complained that a burgeoning feral cat population was turning the village into “one big litter box.” Dennis has been made chief watchdog of the ongoing Bishop Arts cat debacle; she has been sent photos of cats captured in traps left outside businesses as recently as March 26. Her voice sounds defeated as she looks at an image of a black-and-white feline bracing itself against the bars of a cage left outside Emporium Pies, a Good Space property. (She confirmed that the cat in question was soon after released by a friend of Dennis’.) She believes humans need to be better about embracing a harmonious existence with animals; after all, she said, we en- croached on their homes in the first place. “It’s a work in futility trying to rid any area of any animal. It’s not going to happen because people are always going to dump and allow animals to roam,” she said. “It’s just the way it is, the nature of our world.” At this point, Spence says he does not have any traps out in Bishop Arts. He wants this whole drama to blow over, and in the meantime, he has issued a statement on the Good Space Facebook page clarifying that he isn’t a cat killer, he’s merely relocating the pesky felines. For the TNR true believers, though, there is little distinction between killing and relo- cating, and the drama doesn’t seem to be calming down. On a recent walk through Bishop Arts, we asked a business owner if they’d heard about the neighborhood cat controversy. “Oh yes,” the business owner said, eyes widening. “I heard he takes the cats and kills them. That he has a fetish for killing cats.” An attorney by training, Spence is putting together a legal analysis of Chapter 7 of the Dallas city code to point out all the loopholes and gray areas that have allowed cat colonies to thrive in his neighborhood. Fixing the code could take several years, though, a frustrat- ingly long amount of time, he said. “I didn’t set out to catch cats. I need to thwart whatever critter it is who wants to make the crawlspace of a building a home,” Spence said. “I don’t have any [traps] set out now, but if tomorrow I decided as a property owner that on my property I’ve got a critter problem, then yes. I would lawfully set out a trap.” . FEDERAL CUTS MAD AT BOOKS DALLAS’ LIBRARIES HAVE RELIED ON THE SLASHED FUNDING TO START PROJECTS LIKE THE GED TESTING CENTER AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING CLASSES.BY EMMA RUBY D allas Public Library officials say the effort to digitize hundreds of arti- facts associated with Juanita Craft, a civil rights leader and former Dallas City Council member, is on pause due to federal funding cuts. On March 14, President Donald Trump is- sued an executive order dismantling “ele- ments of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary.” Among the federal agencies eliminated in the order was the Institute of Museum and Li- brary Services (IMLS), a small department that awards grant funding to museums and li- braries nationally. The entire IMLS staff was placed on administrative leave last week. According to a Dallas city memo filed Fri- day, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission relies on the federal agency for 33%, or $12.5 million, of its annual funding. The memo states that the sudden fund- ing freeze has caused the Texas State Li- brary and Archives Commission to indefinitely pause expenditures on state grants. Dallas Public Libraries had been re- lying on a $35,674 grant from the commis- sion to fund the Juanita Craft digitization project, which will forever preserve 37.5 cu- bic feet worth of artifacts online. “It’s possible that [the grant] may be re- started before the end of the state’s fiscal year, but it’s just unclear. There’s a lot we don’t know right now,” Heather Lowe, in- terim director of Dallas Public Library, told the Observer. “Digitizing those items not only protects the original items, it also cre- ates much more access and awareness for this really important story that is integral to the story of Dallas.” The library’s Craft collection comprises four parts memorializing the leader who, in 1944, became the first Black woman to vote in a Dallas County public election. The col- lection includes personal items such as pho- tographs, notes, scrapbooks and campaign materials; lectures, essays and articles de- tailing the civil rights and NAACP era in Dallas specific to Craft; correspondence and briefing materials from Craft’s time on the Dallas City Council; and papers pertaining to the Craft estate. Lowe estimated that around a third of the digitization had been completed before the funding was frozen. While the city memo adds that library leaders are still waiting to see the full impact of Trump’s executive order on Dallas’ library system, Lowe worries that further impedi- ments to funding could keep the library from starting services or projects in the fu- ture. Local taxes make up the majority of a public library’s budget. Still, funding issued by a group like the IMLS or the Texas State Library can help fund specialized projects, historic preservation efforts or support staff positions. The GED testing center at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, the homeless en- gagement initiative that offers resources to unhoused Dallasites who visit the library, English language learning classes and the instrument lending program were all proj- ects born out of Texas State Library and Ar- chives Commission grants. It is “very unlikely,” Lowe said, that those projects would have been able to get off the ground without the initial seed grant funding given to the library system. Moreover, the state commission also subsidizes the Dallas Public Library’s online databases of academic journals and legal information. Lowe warned that funding, too, is now in question, which could force the library to re- allocate budget funds to the resources or re- duce the offerings completely. “The state library also supports the interli- brary loan program and things like talk- Emma Ruby A cat that Lisa Dennis, founder of Cats in the Cliff group, was able to trap in Grand Prairie to return to Oak Cliff. >> p8
