adoptions

The Spanish town of Terrassa in north-eastern Catalonia has temporarily banned the adoption of black cats from animal shelters to prevent potentially sinister “rituals” during Halloween.

All requests for the fostering or adoption of the felines will be denied from 6 October to 10 November to protect them from being hurt or used as props, said the local animal welfare service.

Deputy Mayor Noel Duque told broadcaster RTVE that adoption requests for black cats usually increase around Halloween.

While black cats are often associated with witchcraft and seen as bad luck in Western culture, many other cultures, including Japan and Egypt, see them as symbols of prosperity and fortune.

Terassa’s city council said there had been no record of cruelty towards black cats in the town, however there have been incidents in other areas and the decision was taken after warnings from animal welfare groups.

“We try to prevent people from adopting because it’s trendy or impulsively. And in cases like these, which we know exist, to prevent any macabre practices,” Duque said.

Terrassa is home to more than 9,800 cats, according to local authorities, and the town’s adoption centre houses around 100 felines, 12 of which are black, the Catalan News Agency reported.

The city council emphasised that the measure is “temporary and exceptional” and represents an extra precaution for animal welfare, but did not rule out repeating the ban in the future.

Exceptions during the ban period will be assessed individually by the adoption centre and normal fostering requests will resume after Halloween.

SEOUL, Oct. 2 (UPI) — South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Thursday apologized for the country’s troubled history of overseas adoptions, acknowledging that “unjust human rights violations” occurred and vowing stronger safeguards going forward.

“South Korea once bore the shameful stigma of being a ‘child exporter,'” Lee said in a Facebook post.

“While some found loving adoptive families, many suffered their entire lives due to the irresponsibility and inaction of certain adoption agencies,” he said. “My heart is heavy when I think of the anxiety, pain, and confusion of international adoptees who were thrown alone into a foreign land at a young age.”

In March, a long-awaited report by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that the government violated adoptees’ rights as it sought to expedite overseas adoptions rather than strengthen domestic welfare programs. The report highlighted fraudulent practices such as document falsification, infant substitution and inadequate vetting of adoptive parents.

At least 170,000 South Korean children and babies were sent overseas since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s as the country went through a period of explosive economic growth.

Lee noted that even in the 2020s, long after South Korea had become an economic power, an average of more than 100 children per year were still being sent abroad for adoption.

Acknowledging the “unjust human rights violations” cited in the TRC report, Lee said that there were instances where the government “failed to fulfill its role in this process.”

“On behalf of the Republic of Korea, I offer my sincere apologies and condolences to the international adoptees, their families, and their families of origin who have suffered,” he said.

The president’s remarks came one day after South Korea formally became a party to the Hague Adoption Convention, an international treaty meant to establish safeguards for intercountry adoptions. Seoul ratified the treaty in July, some 12 years after signing the pact.

Moving ahead, Lee called on government ministries to “protect the rights of adoptees and establish a human rights-centered adoption system.”

“I also urge them to devise effective support measures to help international adoptees find their roots,” he added.

Long Beach resident Ashley Likins was pages away from finishing “Onyx Storm,” the third installment in Rebecca Yarros’ fantasy book series, when a long-haired black kitten hopped into her lap.

Given the foster name Soup Enhancements, the cat was one of the rescues boarding at Cool Cat Collective, a cat-themed boutique at the eastern end of Long Beach’s Fourth Street Corridor. The store, which offers all manner of cat-themed merchandise from kitty treats to cat-printed coasters, doubles as a shelter for cats rescued by TippedEars, a local trap-neuter-return, or TNR, nonprofit.

These resident kittens at Cool Cat Collective spend most of their time in a luxury “catio” in the back corner of the boutique, but twice a month, they are released to roam about during after-hours fundraising events. A popular silent reading party, co-hosted by reading club LB Bookworms, mimics a cat cafe, and according to the book club’s founder, Martha Esquivias, the event has sold out nearly every month since its debut last November.

Deb Escobar reads a book as foster kitten Poolboy creeps around her during a silent reading night at Cool Cat Collective.

It was during the silent reading event in early August that Likins sat, second-guessing the decision she’d made a few days prior to adopt Soup Enhancements. She adored the cat; still, she worried she’d been impulsive and wasn’t truly ready for the responsibility of pet ownership.

But as she watched the kitten nod off in her lap, she glimpsed the future in which the pair would do this routine a thousand times over with Likins devouring a book and the cat sleeping soundly below.

“I’m not just in a kitten craze,” Likins recalled thinking to herself. “This is my cat.”

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It’s that kind of moment Jena Carr, 39, had dreamed of when she and her husband, Matt, 40, opened Cool Cat Collective last year.

Former Washington, D.C., restaurateurs, the Carrs moved to Long Beach in 2022 to be closer to Jena Carr’s family. Once they settled in, Carr threw herself into kitten rescue, a longtime interest. She started as a foster owner and kitten rescue volunteer before assisting TippedEars with its work tracking and capturing cats in Compton.

“Once you start realizing the extent of the cat overpopulation problem, you quickly realize that we can’t foster or adopt our way out of it,” Carr said, calling TNR “the solution that gets to the root of the problem.”

One day during peak kitten season, Carr was out with TippedEars co-founder Renae Woith when she was struck by the number of sick and injured cats on the streets and the challenges of understaffed rescues working to home them.

“It kind of got her wheels working, like, ‘What can I do as a business?’” Woith said.

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1. Foster kittens Bisque, Poolboy and Chauffeur play together during a silent reading night. 2. Foster kitten Sesame walks around a display in the store.

Almost a year later, Cool Cat Collective was born.

It was still warm outside on an early September evening as the last of the daytime visitors left the cat boutique. Once they were gone, Carr made her final touches for the night’s silent reading party: laying cushions in store corners and scattering toy mice across the floor.

In the catio, Poolboy, a domestic shorthair, licked a Churu treat from a visiting reader’s hand. When he and his siblings — all named after blue-collar jobs — arrived in late July, they were timid. But at this silent reading party, they bounded about the room, crawling on attendees’ laps between wrestling matches.

“It makes me so happy when the shy ones become social,” Carr said.

A sign hanging outside the catio tallied good news: 93 adoptions since July 2024. TippedEars co-founder Vita Manzoli said that’s about double the numbers the rescue used to see before the boutique opened.

TippedEars’ partnership with Cool Cat Collective has been a boon for the nonprofit, which receives 100% of the proceeds from the cat boutique’s “First Thursday” silent reading parties and “Third Thursday” doodle nights, which both cost $15 to attend. But it’s not only the financial support that has made a difference for TippedEars cats.

“We’ve gotten volunteers from them — donors, adopters, obviously, but the byproduct of that is really just educating people about the cat overpopulation crisis, what TNR is and how they can help,” Woith said.

Placing rescues at Cool Cat Collective, where they are comfortable and their personalities are on full display, has also allowed TippedEars to give them a better chance at being adopted.

“The cat they may not have looked twice at online, they now are the one [adopters are] taking home, because they actually got to meet them,” Woith said.

“This is a beautiful marrying of my interests,” silent reading party attendee Regan Rudman said of the event. “It also provides a great third space that we’re really missing nowadays.”

Carr has a spreadsheet of potential resident kittens always on her mind, so she’s eager to facilitate adoptions. But everyone is welcome at Cool Cat Collective, whether they’re looking to adopt or not.

“You don’t even have to be shopping,” Carr said. “That was part of our goal: to create a space with a really low barrier to access for people who are cat-curious or just need a little moment of cat joy in their day.”

Regan Rudman, a recent Long Beach transplant, can’t have a cat of her own for health reasons. Still, she visits Cool Cat Collective every month. She tried for three months to snag a ticket to the store’s silent reading night before she secured a spot for the September event.

“Getting to actually interact with cats in an environment that they feel comfortable in just makes my heart so happy,” Rudman said.

Rudman, who works at a publishing company, made an effort to focus on her book during the silent reading hour, but she also hoped her ruffled leg warmers would entice a curious kitten to come over.

“I think everyone is a little distracted by the cats,” said silent reading party attendee Mathilde Hernandez, who befriended foster cat Gumball.

Other attendees, lounging on cushions throughout the boutique, gazed down at their e-readers but peeked as cats bounced around like pinballs in their periphery.

Poolboy and sibling Chauffer, who would find their forever home together that weekend, were particularly rowdy. On the other hand, Bisque — from a litter Carr called “the Soups” — hid in a cardboard house for an hour before she finally stretched a paw out, like a jazz hand through the “front door.”

“There’s always some antic happening,” Carr said. “People are reading, but they also have one eye on the cats as they’re reading. I’d be curious asking people, like, how far into their book they actually get.”

Attendee Lien Nguyen, whose love for the kittens overrode her cat allergy, admitted she’d drop her book the second a cat came into her vicinity. But no matter how hard they tried, scarcely an attendee could successfully attract a kitten. The cats chose their company, not the other way around.

“Part of our goal was to create a space with a really low barrier to access for people who are cat-curious or, you know, just need a little moment of cat joy in their day,” said Jena Carr, co-founder of Cool Cat Collective.

“It was like rejection therapy whenever they went away,” Nguyen said.

That’s why Likins was so touched when Soup Enhancements found her at the August silent reading party. She nearly burst into tears, she said.

Later that evening, she was moved even more when her boyfriend, Max Mineer, bonded with his feline soulmate, Handyman. Happily, Handyman happened to be the only cat Soup Enhancements tolerated.

Now, the two cats live together in Likins and Mineer’s Long Beach apartment. They sleep together, clean each other and, despite being from different litters, generally behave like siblings.

The day Likins brought the cats home, staffers at Cool Cat Collective and TippedEars gave her every resource imaginable, including a 20% off coupon for Chewy products and scratch post recommendations. And there was an easy out: If anything went wrong, the couple could bring the cats back, no questions asked.

“It really made me trust them more to know that they were thinking to the future about these cats,” Likins said. “It wasn’t just a process of making sure that a cat got a home. It was making sure that a cat got a life.”

More than 140,000 children had been sent overseas by Seoul following the devastating 1950-53 Korean War.

South Korea is set to end the decades-old practice of outsourcing adoptions to private agencies, after a damaging investigation concluded the country’s government-endorsed foreign adoption programme violated the fundamental human rights of adoptees.

On Saturday, South Korea will introduce a “newly restructured public adoption system, under which the state and local governments take full responsibility for the entire adoption process”, South Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare said.

South Korea sent more than 140,000 children overseas following the devastating 1950-53 Korean War, when intercountry adoption was encouraged as a solution.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigation concluded earlier this year that the international adoption process had been riddled with irregularities, including “fraudulent orphan registrations, identity tampering, and inadequate vetting of adoptive parents”.

The new change is a “significant step towards ensuring the safety and promoting the rights of adopted children”, the Health Ministry added.

Under the new system, key procedures – such as assessing prospective adoptive parents and matching them with children – will be deliberated by a ministry committee, under the principle of the “best interests of the child”.

Previously, this had been done by major adoption agencies with minimal oversight from the state. The commission blamed the government for the issues, particularly a failure to regulate adoption fees, which turned the industry into a profit-driven one.

“With this restructuring of the public adoption system, the state now takes full responsibility for ensuring the safety and rights of all adopted children,” said Kim Sang-hee, director of population and child policy at the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

International adoption began after the Korean War as a way to remove mixed-race children, born to Korean mothers and American soldier fathers, from a country that emphasised ethnic homogeneity.

It became big business in the 1970s to 1980s, bringing international adoption agencies millions of dollars as the country overcame post-war poverty and faced rapid and aggressive economic development.

Activists say the new measure is only a starting point and warn it is far from sufficient.

“While I think it’s high time that Korea close down all private adoption agencies, I don’t believe … having the state handle new adoptions is enough,” said writer Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoblom, a Korean adoptee who grew up in Sweden.

The government should prioritise implementing the findings of the truth commission, issue an official apology, and work to help the tens of thousands of Koreans who were sent abroad for adoption, Sjoblom told the AFP news agency.

“The government urgently needs to acknowledge all the human rights violations it enabled, encouraged, and systematically participated in, and, as soon as possible, begin reparations.”