Word on the street is that Paul Zhang has finally moved out of town. We don’t know exactly where he has moved to (it’s far out of state), but we intend to find out to warn animal advocates in his new home. I don’t really expect him to continue his virulent trap-and-kill philosophy, at least not right away. But since his conversion to the PETA way of thinking, he’s bound to encourage needless killing wherever he is.
Obviously this comes as a great relief to all of us in the NYC area, but his destructive actions have opened any number of cans of worms we’re left to deal with in his wake. We now know more than ever than TNR (and the cats it serves) has almost zero legal protection, we know that a single man can within a matter of months kill hundreds of cats wihtout anyone batting an eye (until, of course, he kills a beloved pet). Most of all, we know that the people we think of as leaders in the field will not really help when the situation calls for it. A lot of us believed that someone in authority would surely come out to publicly condemn Zhang’s activities when they were revealed, pursue legal action against him, and ensure this sort of thing couldn’t happen again. What we got was a lot of silence.
I’m not necessarily disappointed by these revelations; in some ways it’s been good to have an incident like this happen if only to see how everybody involved reacts. And whatever is really going on behind the scenes here, the Paul Zhang incident just makes us all look bad. People barely understand TNR as it is, and now many of them know it only as ‘the guy who killed all those cats.’ If it had been handled correctly, it could have properly been framed as a lone psycho who deceived trusting rescuers. But by the time he moved on, it seems more like the entire local movement is so unsure of its own goals it didn’t know whether to denounce him or not.