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Peter Frick-Wright: From ���ϳԹ��� Magazine, this is The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast.

Throughout time, there have been these epic battles between man and beast. You've got Saint George and the Dragon. Moby Dick and Captain Ahab. And then in New York City, you have Mayor Eric Adams versus the rats.

Mayor Eric Adams: Many of us live in communities where rats think they run the city, and we are serious about this. Everyday employees, I hear it all the time. I'm on the trains, I walk in the streets.  People stop me and say, "We are with you, man. We hate those rats."

Peter: Rats are serious business. They get in car engines and homes. They cause illness, steal food, bite children. A few years back, the federal government sued New York City for out of control rats in public housing. Mayor Adams himself got a fine for rats at a building he owned. It's a tough problem.

Adams: Listen, it's many rivers that feed the sea of rats. You have to build dams in every area.

Peter: In 2022, Mayor Adams decided to really try and solve the problem, to give someone real power to coordinate departments like sanitation and housing. The thinking was, that might actually make a dent.

Adams: So, we needed someone that was going to put all the pieces together and all the players together to coordinate this entire symphony of fighters. We needed a maestro.

Peter: A maestro crossed with a pirate. Mayor Adams put out a job description that called for a "swashbuckling attitude" and a "general aura of badassery." The position would become known as New York’s Rat Czar.

Eventually, he found her. Kathleen Corradi.

Kathleen Corradi: There's a new sheriff in town, and with your help, we'll send those rats packing.

Peter: Or, the rats might prefer a staycation. In the past, the city’s finest efforts in rat control have included innovations like offering mint-flavored trash bags. Rats don’t like mint, so they won’t eat through them to get to the trash, right?

Matt Deodado:  The city mandated all this. Did it work? Yeah, it gave the rats a nice minty fresh breath after they ate all the garbage inside the bag!

Peter: This is rat exterminator Matt Deodado, and he is not exactly optimistic about Corradi, whose strategy, so far, centers on rat-proof trash cans. Basically, less garbage means less food; less food means fewer rats.

In the meantime, exterminators like Matt are also doing their part, often by gassing the rats in their burrows.

Matt: We know New York, we know that they talk and talk and talk and don't do much. We have to do things on our own or else nothing's gonna get done.

Peter: Still, at least the city is trying. Because rats aren’t the only pest in New York City.

Matt: We have the German cock-a-roach, we have the Oriental cock-a-roach we have the brown band and smokey brown the American...

Peter: And then there’s this pest that people don’t even call Matt to come get rid of. In fact, tons of us keep them in our homes, on purpose. But like rats, these animals have a big impact on our health, on our wallets, and on the environment.

I'm talking about cats. New York-based reporter Meg Duff has the story.

Meg Duff: It's just about the coldest day of the year, and I'm in a parking lot in Queens, New York, sitting in a classic kidnapper van—white, rusting—with a woman named Gracita Samuel.

She spends most Saturday mornings cat fishing. Not…not like that. I mean, fishing for cats. At least, that’s what this feels like. She preps bait, she sets traps, and she waits.

Gracita Samuel: I wanna have eyes on this cat. but I don't know where this cat is.

Meg: Today, Gracita is trying to catch a gray cat with a hurt paw. She already trapped him, took him to the vet, and got him all healed up. But now, the paw is infected.

Meg: Oh I see his paw.

Gracita: Where is he?

Meg: Oh he came out over here, behind…he's watching that bag that the birds are getting at.

Gracita: The garbage.

Meg: The gray cat is not too interested in Gracita’s pile of kibble. But there's also this long haired orange tabby.

He's interested.

The ginger cat comes closer, then sniffs. Trapping one of them will almost certainly scare the other one away.

Gracita: Don't go in first, let the Grey one go in! He's gonna go in and scare away the one I want. Yep.

Meg: I didn’t know about New York City’s kittenpocalypse until my housemate brought home two kittens. They were named Turntable and Tangerine. They were very cute, and she was fostering them until they could be adopted. That took a bit longer than expected, because these days, there are just more cats available than people who can take them in.

New York, like many cities, has plenty of stray cats. And the first thing you need to know about New York City cats is that they aren’t going to solve the rat problem. Look, the rats are big, okay? The cats prefer food that doesn’t fight back.

Matt: I have seen it with my own eyes. A feral cat colony living right next door to a rat colony. …the cats and the rats live next door to each other by feet, you know, like maybe six feet. You see cats laying there sitting in the sun, and you'll see rat burrows by the dozens, you know six feet away from them.

Meg: And so, instead of two problems that solve each other, New York has a rat crisis, and  a growing cat crisis.

Jonlyn Freeman: So we could see a crisis coming a couple of summers ago. And we knew that if nothing changed, the summer of 2023 was going to be a disaster. And it was.

Meg: This is Jonlyn Freeman, who advocates for New York City cat rescuers. And she says, the current Kittenpocalypse was several years in the making. First, vets closed during the pandemic, so fewer cats got fixed. That meant more kittens.

Plus, private investors took over many of New York’s vet clinics.

Jonlyn: We've also got the private equity takeover of a lot of vet clinics in New York City, which contributes to the problem too. So it's like coming from everywhere,

Meg: Partly as a result of corporate takeovers, vet bills have ballooned nationwide. Veterinarian pay has gone down, so has morale, and now there's a nationwide vet shortage.

So, there’s that. Then, the pandemic struck again. This time, by ending, at least on paper. That meant fewer food and healthcare subsidies and the end of many eviction protections. Then, inflation hit. More poverty for families, more cats on the street.

Jonlyn: So, you know, the cat crisis in New York is also an income inequality problem.

Meg: Last summer, New York City’s animal shelters hit their limit, and temporarily stopped accepting cats from pet owners who needed to give them up. It’s hard to know how many extra cats roam the streets as a result. But there are plenty of people going to extreme lengths to try to get that number down. Which brings us back to Gracita, trying to lure a gray cat with a hurt paw into her trap, but getting more interest from an orange

Gracita: See, I’m gonna end up trapping this cat. But it’s alright if I trap him, cuz I haven’t done him.

Meg: Gracita traps cats to get them spayed or neutered. And, ideally, fostered, and adopted. But when that doesn’t work out, Gracita’s alternative is catch and release. Spay, neuter, back on the street.

Gracita: I'm gonna trap the ginger. Done!

Meg: This “Trap Neuter Release” approach to stray cats, called TNR for short, is pretty palatable for most people. Fewer kittens, fewer cats, no killing. And it attracts a lot of volunteers. Gracita has collected a whole web of support: people who pay the vet bills, people who post cats on social media to get them adopted—even an admin assistant.

Gracita: I'm not doing it by myself.

Meg: Yeah, good.

Gracita: It’s too much. This is like a terrible thing to do by yourself, you’d be lost, you’d be…

Meg: Well cause I feel like some people do, right? like some people are trying to like…

Gracita: Mm-hmm! Some people have 100 cats in their house and they do TNR all the time and then. No, I can't. Mm-m. Yeah, no.

Meg: Gracita has a full-time job as a social worker, and she doesn’t have a hundred cats in her house, but she does have ten that she’s trying to find homes for. Plus six of her own.

Meg: You don't feel like you run out of compassion?

Gracita: No!

Meg: No?

Gracita: No, how could you?

Meg: People do!

Gracita: No, I don't know. I’m not that type.

Meg: Gracita traps cats every week. She has gotten whole cat colonies spayed and neutered. But the problem with Trap Neuter Release is that it takes a lot of work by a lot of people to keep up with the current cat problem. Which, it turns out, didn’t start with Covid.

Grant Sizemore: It’s definitely not a pandemic problem. This is an ongoing crisis that has been occurring in the United States for many years.

Meg: Here’s Grant Sizemore, from the American Bird Conservancy.

Grant: And, unless we take some very drastic steps to correct it, it will continue and get worse as we move forward.

Meg: Got it.

Grant: That was pretty dire!

Meg:The thing is, the cat situation is getting dire.

In just four decades, the US cat population doubled, and then tripled. No one is really counting, but back of envelope math says there may be a million cats in New York city alone, with as many as half of them stray or feral.

And this cat crisis is a crisis for cats. It's a crisis for people. It’s also a crisis for America.

We like to think of America as this place of abundance. Abundant birds. Abundant bugs. Abundant bats, and frogs.

Except, we have a lot fewer of all of those animals than we did 40 years ago.

Grant: We've lost about 3 billion birds in the United States and Canada over the last 50 years. So we are losing birds, even common birds are becoming less common.

Meg: We've lost one out of every 5 birds. Almost a third of our bugs. And many many bats and frogs, thanks in both cases to devastating pandemics. On the flip side…

We do have more cats! And in North America, they’re an invasive species. Tens of millions of invasive cats, wandering around outside eating tens of billions of birds, bugs, bats, frogs, lizards, and mice every year.

I will pause here, to acknowledge that I have now stumbled into a polarizing debate.

Jonlyn: Are we talking about birds? Is—are we—are we launching into that conservationists versus cat rescuers?

Meg: Over the years, battle lines have been drawn. And philosophy nerds might recognize this as a classic trolly problem.

To oversimplify: You can save one cat, but then many birds will die. Or you can save the birds but that would mean killing the cat. Either way, you are responsible for both deaths.

And, there's not actually a right answer. And, definitely not one everyone agrees on.

People can’t even agree on whether feeding cats on the street helps or hurts. Because feeding outdoor cats, like Gracita does, probably means they don’t eat quite as many birds.

Unfortunately, it doesn't turn off their kill instinct. And cats kill for sport more than you might think.

Grant: Many people will say, “Well, my cat only kills one bird, a month” or something. You really need to multiply that by four or five, to get the true impact of that cat in the environment.

Meg: And, ok this is dark but hear me out: if you help cats live longer, they eat more birds.

Grant: So like Central Park, for example, it's a major stopover point for migrating birds. For example, birds that are traveling thousands of miles, they need this place to stop over along their journey to refuel to rest, you know, get their bearings. And having cats from those surrounding environments, infiltrating Central Park and other areas where these birds might stop over, can frequently result in the death of those birds.

Meg: In February, the UN put out a report on migratory species. Half are in decline. 20 percent face extinction. For migratory birds, invasive species like cats are a top three threat. And it's not just cats eating birds.

Just seeing a cat can make some birds abandon their nests. They get spooked. They stop feeding their chicks. They stop laying eggs. Many birds just weren't built for this kind of stress, which makes sense. Historically, New York would have supported a few felines total. Not tens or hundreds of thousands of them. Of course, it's not just the cats’ fault that birds are dying. But cats make an already bad situation worse.

Grant: It’s death by 1000 cuts for the species that are just struggling to survive.

Meg: Worldwide, cats have made dozens of animals go extinct. Cats and rats together have caused more extinctions than any other invasive species. Flightless island birds, like the kiwi, really don’t do well with cats around. The Kiwi is New Zealand's national bird, and so there, the cat management includes concerned citizens shooting cats with .22 millimeter rifles. That doesn’t sit well with many cat lovers. Obviously.

In the lower 48, we don’t have any flightless island birds. And as far as we know, house cats also haven’t hunted any species to extinction.

Yet.

But extinction isn’t the only metric for harm.

Grant: So birds are an integral part of our ecosystems.

Meg: Fewer hummingbirds can be bad for flowers, for example, even if the hummingbirds don’t go totally extinct.

Grant: I think many people look up in the sky and they just say, oh, yeah, there's birds. But until you really start to identify different bird species, a bird is a bird is a bird. And that's really not the case.

Meg: Extinction is also pretty hard to predict. It happens gradually, then all at once.

Consider the humble New York City pigeon. I have some living on my roof, care of the neighborhood pigeon guy. But America used to be known for a very different pigeon.

The passenger pigeon. There were billions of them. They flew in giant flocks that could take hours or days to pass overhead.

Then, settlers started clearing forests and hunting passenger pigeons commercially. In 1860, they seemed fine. 50 years later, they were extinct. Our most plentiful bird gone.

Americans don't hunt for food as much as we used to. But our cats do. And after habitat loss, cats may be the second biggest threat to many birds in the US. That's not to say that blackbirds or sparrows are going extinct. Just that cats are putting more pressure on species already under a pretty decent amount of pressure. And the harm cats do isn’t confined to their hunting. They also spread disease.

Grant: There’s a huge impact for the transmission of parasites and diseases from cats to wildlife, from cats to livestock and other domestic animals, and from cats to people as well.

Matt: Think about the Dark Ages, the bubonic plague wiped out half of Europe in the, right, 1500s. Right. So they have this thing about it that a rat is this dirty, filthy creature.

It's really not. I mean, a rat's pretty clean. It grooms itself. It lives in a family type setting. You know, it does all the other things that every other creature does. But you know, humans like everything else gives it a reputation.

Meg: We think of cats as clean and rats as dirty, But cats carry many of the same diseases that rats do, including bubonic plague. They are just as likely to be the next pangolin, sparking the next pandemic. And that may sound way overblown until you remember that cats do host this one, very weird parasite.

Grant: So a cat is a definitive host for the parasite Toxoplasma gondii II that causes toxoplasmosis.

And so a single cat can excrete, in its feces, up to hundreds of millions of these tiny infectious eggs called oocysts into the environment where they remain infectious for months to years.

Meg: You may have heard about this. This is that disease that turns rats into zombies, essentially reprogramming them to follow cats instead of running away.

We can get toxo too. That's why pregnant women aren’t supposed to scoop cat litter. But, for us, there are tests and treatments. Other animals aren't so lucky.

Grant: I think it's about a 60% infection rate among white tailed deer in northern Ohio.

Meg: Livestock and deer also get toxo. And with rising temperatures, toxo rates are going up.

Oh, and then it rains. And the cat poop washes into the ocean.

Grant: that feces that is deposited with the Toxoplasma gondii oocytes flows through the terrestrial environment into the marine environment and subsequently infects Hawaiian Monk Seals, which are a federally endangered species. There are only about 300 Hawaiian Monk Seals left in the main Hawaiian Islands and this is the top disease concern for the conservation of Hawaiian Monk Seals.

Meg: Seals, dolphins, whales, sea otters, all can die from toxo. Even if you only value animals for their cuteness, and don’t really care about birds, sea otters are cute and cuddly and smart. They hold hands! They use tools. Our cats are not morally culpable for their deaths. But we might be, if we don’t do anything. And that makes it feel a little uncomfortable that we’ve given cats this special place in our society.

Grant: You know, actually my grandfather always had cats. And I remember in his kitchen, he had a little thing that said, cats are people too. And so because of this unique location within the psyche of people, I think cats have fallen through the gaps a little bit in terms of management and our responsibility for them and to them and in managing the impacts that they can have in the environment.

Meg: Cats, legally, are companion animals, not wildlife. And yet, feral cats wind up slinking through all sorts of legal loopholes. Thing is, even the cat people agree that we need to do something about the kittypocalypse. The problem is, there are two very different camps, with two very different ideas of what we should do.

Jonlyn: I'll make my position perfectly clear. In an ideal world, we'd have zero outdoor cats.

Meg: This is Jonlyn Freeman again, the advocate for cat rescuers. And she says, the only real way forward here is to try to decrease cat numbers slowly, by sterilizing cats, finding homes for them if you can, putting them back on the street if you can’t. TNR. You know, the option that gets good buy in.

Jonlyn: The cat feeder, that lady who knows where all the cats in the neighborhood are is more likely to cooperate with you if she knows you're trying to help the cats. And then you interrupt the feline reproductive cycle in the next generations and you gradually get cats aging out of these outdoor colonies.

Meg: TNR keeps more cats from being euthanized, but it’s often not enough. It gives a lot of cats a lot of time to hunt birds and spread disease in the meantime. And especially without a big, coordinated effort, it may not reduce cat populations .

Grant: Yeah, it's very bad policy. It's misguided. It's going to be counterproductive. It's just bad policy.

Meg: Feeding outdoor cats, taking them to the vet, giving them shelter, Grant pointed out, is nice for the cats, but it also means their population will never hit a natural limit. We could be sitting around waiting for the population to decline forever.

Grant: They don't think, Oh, dang, you know, another cat, let's, let's get it out of here. They say, Okay, let's throw some more food on the ground and make sure that cat is okay, too.

And so what you end up doing is just continuing to add more food, more food, more resources to the environment, which increases the carrying capacity, which is just an ecological term for the number of animals that can exist within a given area.

Meg: Remember Gracita? Who never runs out of compassion for the cats in her neighborhood? Well, people take advantage.

Gracita: I think people dump their cats. They know exactly like they’re like, oh you’ll get food here, she’ll come by.

Meg: Even when people aren’t dumping unwanted cats in colonies, there is still a basically endless supply of cats. Near Gracita, for example, there is a local meat and seafood warehouse that won't sterilize its mousers.

Gracita: The thing with cats, right? So as soon as they get like six months, the male will wander off and go start his own family.

Meg:Thanks to the warehouse, Gracita deals with a constant influx of black and white kittens. And finding homes for all these cats can be hard.

And that’s just the cats in the few blocks that she feels responsible for. There are plenty that no one is even trying to take care of.

On the way home, Gracita and I pass a park.

Gracita: This is Baisley Pond. There’s a hundred here over too, but I close my eyes. I walk the other way when I go by.

Meg: Back at her place, we drop off the orange cat in the garage.

Then, we go upstairs to the cat room. A kitten dashes out the door.

Meg: Oop! Got a runner!

In addition to three indoor cats and three outdoor cats, Gracita also has a rotating herd of cats in her spare room. I keep spotting more of them, peering out from drawers and staring down from shelves.

Meg: Ok how many cats are in this… how many are there here?

Gracita: Ten.

Meg: Ten cats, including the three Gracita is taking to an adoption fair. She’s not taking more because she's not sure if they’ll get chosen.

Gracita: I don't want to make my cats go through no trauma.

Meg: We wrestle the cats into cat carriers and load them into the car. Along the way, Gracita picks up a cat that needs a ride to a foster home.

And she swings by to grab a friend.

Annette: Oh my God, all the cat ladies are here.

Meg: Then we pick up some cat food from a donor.

Gracita: Hi Jean, I'm downstairs.

Donor: Okay, let me come out.

Gracita: Okay.

Meg: And she drops off the foster kitten.

Gracita: Would you be thinking about adopting or just fostering?

Hannah: Right now, just fostering.

Meg: This is a pretty typical Saturday. The endless supply of cats means that for Gracita, trapping, feeding and transporting cats is almost another full time job.

Finally, we pull up in front of a big van parked on a busy street in downtown Brooklyn. The vibe is like “come in, kids, impulse adopt a cat.” They’re all wearing little bows, with bios taped on their cages. Gracita drops off her three.

Gracita: But, see, this is a desperate situation, you can tell, right? We need cats to be adopted, so they're going to come in the community and show you that.

Meg: Yes. Have a cat, it's cute.

Gracita: I guess that's what it is.

​

Meg: If any of these cats are adopted, Gracita will then do home visits, just like she would in her day job as a social worker.

Gracita: I’ll go to their homes, and I'll do follow up checks. Okay. Okay, because I do come from placement of children. So I continue. I do that. I follow up. I make sure that the cats are okay.

Meg: Except, when I check in later, she tells me that none of the three got adopted. That's the other problem with TNR. There aren’t currently enough forever homes for cats that need them.

And now, everyone take a big, deep breath. Because we’ve arrived at the other option. The one that doesn’t get a lot of buy-in.

Grant: For stray and feral cats, whether in a colony or not, they really need to be removed from the landscape.

Meg: “Removed from the landscape” doesn’t necessarily mean killing them. It means keeping your cats on your property so they don’t become strays or produce strays. Grant has an indoor cat, Amelia Bedilia, who he lets outside on a leash. Cat proof fences or catios are also an option, although in a city like New York, most humans don’t have their own patios, let alone space for a catio.

Grant: And then the other way is to physically remove them from the environment, rehabilitate them, give them the opportunity for habituation, if they're not already habituated, and adoption into loving lifelong homes. Otherwise placement, any long term holding facility like a Cat Sanctuary, and if no other options are available, then euthanasia. But again never releasing those cats back out onto the streets where they are going to be exposed to injury and disease and cause a variety of different harms to wildlife and public health.

Meg: In other words. Trap the cats. Neuter the cats. And if they can't be adopted, kill them. To which the cat people are like, “hahahaha” go ahead and try to set that up.  They don’t see that going over well.

Jonlyn: Like the PR campaign they would have to wage on trap and kill, I would love to see it. It's just not going to work. We are too invested in cats.

Meg: Killing cats is not only unpopular, it does not come with volunteers eager to donate their time. But then again, neither does killing rats.

Matt: I would never kill a rat or a mouse or a creature or even in my own house, I would take, probably take it outside and let it go. Because I don't feel I should be killing anything. But if you pay me to do it, it's my job and how I put kids through school and pay mortgages and all that other stuff. It becomes a job. I have nothing against these creatures. I believe we all have to live on this planet in harmony. But you know, if you’re paying me to do it, I have to do it. It's what my trade is, I have done nothing else in my life since 1984.

Meg: When trap and kill has been effective in reducing populations, it’s usually been in places where cats dramatically threatened a well-loved local species, like New Zealand's Kiwi. Even so, it’s often less carrot and more stick. In Brisbane Australia, feeding cats can come with jail time.

So. Save them all, remove them all.

Trying to think through which animals deserve care makes me very aware that I am also an animal, with my own biases. I prefer other mammals. I definitely prefer ones that purr. It takes effort to care about little chirpy birds, or to think about all the ways our choices hurt ecosystems. I don’t like being reminded that even my best moral instincts, like saving cats, might have unintended consequences.

And the way people have carved out camps in this thing can make the cat crisis feel as doomed as any other culture war. Grant’s organization, the American Bird Conservancy, successfully opposed New York State legislation from directly funding TNR for unowned cats.

Meanwhile, cat nonprofits have downplayed environmental harms, even when cat colonies were threatening endangered species in New York state parks. It feels intractable. Except, for one thing that absolutely everyone I talked to agreed on.

Whatever else we do, pet cats should be sterilized.

Grant: So essentially, the house is flooding, we need to turn off the tap.

Meg: One way to make sure cats get sterilized is making it illegal to not get your cats sterilized.

Jonlyn: I would love it if New York City had that law, because rescuers spend so much time trying to convince people to let them spay and neuter their animals. It would be so easy if that kind of diplomacy was taken off their shoulders, and they could just go to someone and say, spay-neuter is the law. I'm here to help you. And that was it.

Meg: Another way to do it, would be making it more affordable for pet owners.

Gracita: Every household should just have a voucher to spay and neuter. If you have a cat, you should have like a sign up to get it spayed and neutered everywhere.

Meg: I never thought I’d say this, but maybe pets need affordable health care? Maybe it’s also a matter of treating cats, more like we treat dogs.

Grant: So these policies could be as simple as changing the existing code of ordinances wherever it says dogs adding “and cats.” I mean, we're not talking about anything revolutionary here, we're talking about elevating the level of care and responsibility for cats to the level that we already provide for dogs.

Meg: You may not remember this, but New York City used to have packs of dogs roaming around. And we don’t anymore. Because at a certain point we decided that owning a dog came with the responsibility of getting it fixed and not letting it roam around. But that was both a cultural shift and a policy shift.

Which means that actually solving the kittenpocalypse is not a job just for volunteers. It might be a job for someone like Kathleen Corradi, our city’s swashbuckling Rat Czar.

Corradi: I will bring a science and systems based approach to reducing New York City's rat population.

Meg: Corradi is a woman with a budget, a staff, and the authority to coordinate across departments to deal with rats. But not cats.

Jonlyn: But yeah cat rescuers were like why is all this attention on rats. And cats are something people actually care about a lot more than rats. We're having a crisis in New York. Why aren't any resources being allocated to that?

Meg: In some sense, the city is taking advantage of private citizens to dodge what is arguably a public responsibility. We have a Rat Czar. Maybe we need a Cat Czar, too.

Jonlyn: We allocate more tax dollars to a bag of garbage on the sidewalk than we do to someone's abandoned pet. I think most New Yorkers would say they care more about this homeless, abandoned animal.

Meg: New York City does have animal shelters. They are, arguably, underfunded. It has a Mayor’s office for animal welfare—also, underfunded and understaffed, according to everyone I spoke with.

Of course, "tough on rats" is an easy political win. "Tough on cats" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. If we did get a cat czar, they would inherit a political mess. To make a dent, our Cat Czar might need Czar-like powers. Political autonomy, influence across departments and with lawmakers, and a vast budget.

Preferred qualifications? Cat-like ability to tread lightly around political landmines. Independent. Sphinx-like calm. And not catty. Must make people feel included and help warring factions hiss and make up. The ideal candidate will be purr-suasive. Able to change the minds of people who might not want their minds changed. At this job, the easy part is herding cats.

Peter: Meg Duff, is a New York-based science journalist.

Over the last two months, all 3 of the cats Gracita tried to get adopted did finally find homes. The gray cat with the hurt paw is still out there.

This episode was written and produced by Meg Duff, with editing by me, Peter Frick-Wright. Music and sound design by Robbie Carver.

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