Nebraska senator says he’s sorry for saying schools offered litter boxes for ‘furries’

A Nebraska state senator has walked back comments he made during a televised debate in which he referenced false rumors about schools providing litter boxes for children who identify as cats, according to media reports.

“.It’s something called furries. School children dress up as animals — cats or dogs — during the school day; they meow, and they bark,” Republican state Sen. Bruce Bostelman said during the debate over a school funding bill on Monday, March 28. “And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?”

Hours after the debate, Bostelman said his comments were incorrect and apologized, according to The Associated Press.

“It was just something I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly,” Bostelman told AP.

But by the time Bostelman publicly apologized, his comments had already gone viral, with one video, posted by a KMTV reporter, being viewed nearly 750,000 times.

Bostelman was referencing false claims that had circulated on social media in recent months about litter boxes at schools for children who identified as animals, according to the Washington Post.

When reached by McClatchy News Service, a spokesman for the Nebraska Department of Education declined to comment on the senator’s comments. Sen. Bostelman’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Late last year, a Michigan superintendent debunked a rumor that a school in that state was providing litter boxes for students, according to USA Today. Similar rumors spread in Iowa in February, according to North Iowa Today.

In Nebraska, the rumor began in a Facebook group called Protect Nebraska Children in which a parent asked about litter boxes in school bathrooms, according to KMTV.

“I’m not trying to propagate a rumor, I just want to know if it’s true, and I’m praying that it’s not,” reads a screenshot of the post published on Twitter by KMTV reporter John Kipper.

A school secretary said that the rumors were not true, according to KMTV.

Officials from school districts around the state told the Nebraska Examiner that the claims were unfounded, calling the comments “ridiculous” and “an ugly rumor.”