In response to the Seward Police Department dropping a lost cat outside of city limits, some community members are calling on the department to make a policy change.
Police Chief Brian Peters said the Seward Police Department got a call from a woman who found an unidentified cat wandering an apartment building. The woman put a sign on her door to let neighbors walking by know about it and kept the cat for the night but said she could not keep him any longer.
SPD sent out an animal control officer who went to the building and did not find anyone who claimed ownership of the cat. The officer relocated the cat outside of city limits, which Peters said has always been the department’s policy.
June Niemann, who volunteers with the Cat House in Lincoln and worked in pet care for years, heard about the incident from a Reddit post by the owner’s friend. She said she wrote to the Seward County Independent because she fears for the cats in Seward.
The Reddit post claimed the officer did not knock on people’s doors and told the cat’s owner he “didn’t have time.”
Peters said the officer checked the cat for an identification chip and talked to some neighbors he saw at the apartment, one of whom told him they had seen the cat running around outside a couple of times recently. Niemann said the information the resident provided was false, and the cat was clearly not a stray because he is a good size, acts domesticated and is declawed.
Niemann said the cat’s owner, who did not realize his cat Neptune slipped out the door when he went to run an errand, camped out at the spot Neptune was released for two nights in hopes of finding him. A couple of Seward residents found cats matching Neptune’s description and reported them to the police, but none of them turned out to be him.
Niemann is in contact with a friend of Neptune’s owner, who told her Neptune is still missing.
Amy Bolton of Lincoln runs a nonprofit sanctuary for cats called The Purrpose and is the trap-neuter-return coordinator at The Cat House. She explained cats often provide their owners with a greater sense of mental stability and well-being, which can make situations like these particularly distressing for pet owners.
“It’s obvious that this cat was declawed, and was a senior cat and a domesticated cat, and taking him out to a country road and leaving him was a death sentence, because there was no way this cat could defend himself,” Bolton said.
Peters said SPD has a formal policy for handling lost dogs due to existing city ordinances regarding dogs running at large and barking violations. He noted there are no comparable ordinances regulating felines, which limits the department's resources and guidance for managing lost cats.
“With cats, cats would be no different than a possum or a raccoon as far as how we would deal with it, because there's really little to no guidance in city ordinances,” he said.
Peters said the department does not have a place to put stray cats and does not have the resources to relocate them to the Humane Society in Lincoln. For years, its policy has been to let them go outside of the city limits.
Cat-lover Michelle Saraphian of Lincoln heard about the incident and, as a former Seward worker and someone with a mother living in Seward, wrote to the Seward County Independent to call for change. Saraphian expressed concern over the incident, describing the department’s treatment of cats as “inhumane” and “egregious.”
She suggested there may be a double standard in that people would not do something like this to a dog.
“I just would like the police to come up with a different plan,” Saraphian said. “Truly, I think that's outrageous, what they did. I don't think they would ever do that to a dog. Why the hell are they doing that to a cat? I emailed the police department twice, and they haven't responded at all.”
According to the SPD’s website, the department brings lost dogs to the Cross Creek Animal Health Center in Staplehurst and posts photos of them on the department’s Facebook page.
Peters said the department recently learned that Cross Creek Animal Center would also take cats. However, it would cost the owner $150 to get the cat back and the center would try to find a new home for the cat if it is not claimed within five days. This is the same policy it uses for dogs.
Peters said there are steps people can take to help officers identify their cats in this situation, including chipping their cats and getting them collars with contact information. He said without identification, the department has no way of finding the owner.
Seward Animal Hospital and Cross Creek Animal Center both offer chipping services.
“I don’t want it to seem that we aren’t sympathetic to pet owners, because we certainly are. With the limited resources we have, that's been our policy for many years, that we just relocate them, and that's not been a problem in the past,” Peters said. “But, if there's a way or if it's getting people talking, if it's getting some of the local animal advocates working together to come up with a different solution, we are more than happy to engage in that conversation and help come up with a viable solution.”
