Bodegas need cats to catch mice, but strictly speaking food businesses are not supposed to have animals in residence.
Bodegas need cats to catch mice, but strictly speaking food businesses are not supposed to have animals in residence.
Bodegas need cats to catch mice, but strictly speaking food businesses are not supposed to have animals in residence.
Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look bodega cats and a petition that proposes a way out of their Catch-22.
Mia and Silver and Gracie are captivating, charming and cute — cuddly, even. They are a very New York solution to a problem.
And, like the other cats in delis and bodegas across the city, they pose a different problem.
Bodega and deli cats don’t just loll the day away, napping alongside the candy at the cash register. They do a job, patrolling for “the problem all New Yorkers have,” as Maria Alavi delicately put it. Alavi, the owner of the Bean Gourmet Coffee deli at 320 West 14th Street, did not say the word “mice.” Or, worse, “rats.”
But deli and bodega owners say that their cats, prey- and protein-craving creatures that they are, make mice vanish. Problem solved.
That problem, anyway. State law says animals other than service animals cannot be in places where food and beverages are sold. So Mia and Silver and Gracie could be written up by an inspector.