A TikTok viewed hundreds of thousands of times has sparked rumours of students identifying as animals and requesting litter boxes in the bathrooms – all of which is untrue. But where did these stories come from? And why are they so dangerous?

If you’ve been online at all recently, you may have already heard fantastical anecdotes about litter boxes installed in school bathrooms to accommodate animal-identifying students or child “furries”. The yarn is so intriguingly bizarre that it’s perhaps unsurprising how quickly it captured the imagination and the whisper-mill of school children, parents, the general public and, in the US at least, politicians. 

Like all the most successful schoolyard gossip, a key feature of these fictional tales is that they’re told by someone who is at least one person removed from the story. The rumours often sound something like: “My hairdresser’s daughter’s friend walked in on her classmate using a litter box at school last week” or “A neighbour told me his cousin does maintenance at a school where there are so many students identifying as cats that litter boxes were installed in the bathrooms”. Another quirk is that despite living in a world where almost everyone carries a camera in their back pocket, there’s no photographic or video evidence of these apparent kitty litter loo facilities, nor of the supposed cat-identifying students who use them.

A video posted by TikTok account @lordpeachy2rumble on Monday featured a pair of what seem to be ex-students of Whangārei Girls High School filmed on Auckland’s Queen Street. It’s night, and they’re speaking to camera about a supposed litter box incident at the school. “At Whangārei Girls High School…there was a petition to get litter boxes in our bathrooms for furries – girls who identify as cats and dogs and what not,” they say in the video. They add that the principal eventually went on stress leave because of the situation and the students who supposedly identified as cats and dogs “ended up taking shits in the toilet sink”.

At more than 700,000 views so far, the video is easily the most-watched on this user’s TikTok account. It has also generated more than 2,000 comments, many of which simply say “WTF”.

So did any of this actually happen?

“None of this has any truth to it at all,” Whangārei Girls High School acting principal Sonya Lockyer told The Spinoff. Despite stories of litter boxes at the school propagating among the community for the past year, “we definitely haven’t been asked to provide litter boxes, no one has been defecating in the sinks and the principal has not gone on stress leave,” Lockyer said. And beyond a memory of a student occasionally wearing a headband with cat ears attached, Lockyer said she has no knowledge of any students at the school identifying as animals. Since being made aware of the TikTok, she has reported the video to Netsafe.

Whangārei Girls High School may be the most prominent example, but speak to students or parents anywhere in Aotearoa and you’re likely to find someone familiar with the stories. The thing is, while the image of litter boxes in school bathrooms might seem harmlessly silly on the surface, this urban legend is no joke to those it indirectly targets. 

Pinpointing an exact point of origin for the fictional stories is difficult, but media coverage of the school litter box hoax goes back to at least as early as 2021 in Canada. Similar rumours began to swirl in Michigan in December that year, in the wake of a video showing a board of education meeting in which a speaker claimed that litter boxes were placed in student bathrooms for those who identify as “furries”. The existence of both child “furries” and litter boxes in bathrooms was debunked the next month by Reuters but similar stories continued to spread among schools in other states. Ahead of the 2022 US elections, various prominent Republican politicians and media personalities continued to propagate the hoax. Despite there being no confirmed instances of schools providing litter boxes for students, social media has helped to amplify the tales.

In August last year, the NZ Herald republished a story from news.com.au with the headline “Year 8 girl identifying as cat at school in Melbourne”. It was only taken down from the Herald website, almost a week later, after journalist David Farrier debunked the story in his newsletter.

While there is a real subculture of people known as “furries” – people who role play as animal characters – the overwhelming majority of them still identify as humans.

Separately, both classrooms and bathrooms have become battlegrounds in the larger culture wars. The litter box rumour has perhaps been so successful because of the way it combines the two. Against a backdrop of growing fearmongering around gender diversity, the hoax is seen by many as an implicit attack on gender diverse and transgender communities, part of a backlash against recognition of gender variance in schools. It’s a rumour implicitly crafted to provoke a kind of “what has the world come to?” alarm from those who stumble across it, with the insinuation that growing acceptance of and protections for LGBTQ+ students in schools are a slippery slope ultimately leading to bathroom litter boxes and animal-identifying kids. 

Unfortunately, New Zealand is not immune to this rhetoric, and it could be why we’re seeing this type of rumour propagated locally. Research published in May shows how online anti-trans hate intensified this year around the visit from anti-trans campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (Posie Parker) in March.

A Ministry of Education spokesperson said in an email to The Spinoff, “Schools play an important and trusted role in responding to mis/disinformation by teaching our young people critical thinking so they can make reasoned judgements about what they are reading, seeing and hearing.” 

It added, “however, this responsibility stretches beyond schools and into our wider communities. We all have a part to play in challenging mis/disinformation and supporting young people to do the same with confidence.”  

Closing its early childhood services may end up costing the council, while also taking away a vital community resource.

On the Facebook page for Kauri Kids, the network of council-funded community early childhood education centres across Auckland, things seem rosy. Children experience sustainability by playing with shredded paper; they make sandpit volcanoes with multi-coloured lava; they clamber over brightly coloured miniature playground equipment. 

But with Auckland’s budget due to be voted on by councillors tomorrow, these centres may soon be gone. While edits to the budget last week offered the option of selling the council’s airport shares to fund social services, arts, and increase bus driver pay, restoring funding for Kauri Kids was not among them.

The justification is that closing the childcare network, which operates in 10 locations at council-owned leisure centres around Auckland, will save the council a million dollars a year. It’s accounting that doesn’t make sense to NZEI, the education union, which has been protesting the closures since the draft budget was released last year. “Closing Kauri Kids will have little to no savings for ratepayers,” said NZEI early childhood representative Sandie Burn in a press release. 

While removing the centres would save on operating costs, new private tenants would have to be found for the spaces Kauri Kids currently occupy, and the council would have to pay out redundancy pay nearly equivalent to the suggested savings, as many of the ECE teachers at the centres have collective contracts.

It’s a frustrating situation, says Jessica McLean, a parent at Kauri Kids in Stanmore Bay. “I was drowning at home, my kids were isolated after Covid lockdowns,” she says. “The level of care I receive from Kauri Kids is amazing – they put ice in my kids water bottles when it’s hot.” The centres provide a particularly important service, offering childcare for children under the age of two, which not all early childhood education centres do.

The affordability is crucial: run as not-for-profits, the Kauri Kids centres are among the cheapest early childhood education available in Auckland. The low cost, combined with the supportive environment, is what made it possible for McLean to send her kids to the Stanmore Bay centre. “We don’t have many other options [that take kids under two] for the same price – people across Auckland are freaking out.” 

NZEI has pointed out that the losses the centres are making are marginal, and could change with a fee restructure. “The provision of low-cost, high quality ECE that caters for all children – including those with high needs which can’t be met at many for-profit centres – is an important community service,” NZEI secretary Stephanie Mills wrote in an open letter as part of the union’s Auckland budget submission. 

McLean especially appreciates that at Kauri Kids her two kids can be together, in the same room; if the centres close, her son and daughter, two years apart, will have to go to different centres – adding another burden to her and her partner to do drop-offs and pick up, and preventing the siblings from spending time together. And that’s if her kids can get through the months-long waiting lists for many local centres, which have less flexible hours and often cost more. 

Kit Arkwright, a parent at the Takapuna centre, says that he would be “pretty devastated” if it closed. His daughter is well settled now. “When it was announced last year [that the centres might close] we tried another kindy, and it didn’t work out.” After months of uncertainty, he’s worried about the potential disruption for his family. “My request is to give the centres a chance to adapt, to find savings, to restructure the fees, to become viable,” he says. “I know there’s a need to be pragmatic, but even if it does save a million dollars, it’s not going to make much of a dent in the $375m hole.”

“The council has a wonderful resource, and I don’t know why they would squander it,” says Mclean. “I’m not asking the council to fund my kid’s daycare; I’m just saying, please be transparent with the numbers – if it really does cost ratepayers a million dollars I don’t know why you wouldn’t do it properly, get experts involved.” 

An alternative to closing the centres would be transferring them to be organised through the local board and run as a community crèche, run with support of parents. But McLean says that while this might be good, it could just put more pressure on already overloaded working parents. 

If nothing else, McLean says that the voice of her children should be listened to. “My one-year-old runs to the door when I say it’s time for Kauri Kids… my daughter says “can I go to Kauri Kids” when we’re at playcentre together, and playcentre is like her second home; she loves it so much she’d rather be there even if she’s apart from me.” 

The final version of the budget, including the Kauri Kids decision, will be announced after Auckland Council’s governing body votes it through at a meeting on Thursday.