A Big Problem with an Easy Fix
Robert Casserly, 20.05.2007 11:23
Each spring, local citizens surrender thousands of cats and kittens to the local animal shelter.
a volunteer comforts a shelter kitten
A Big Problem with an Easy Fix
T.S. Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month". We who work and volunteer at the Jackson County Animal Shelter might well argue that May is even worse, because every year as the calendar creeps closer to June the general level of stress at the shelter slowly builds like a calm before a summer storm. We know all to well what's about to happen, because it's happened every late spring for as far back as anyone can remember.
Imagine showing up for work one morning and there's a line of people waiting for the door to open, and most of them are holding a box or a cage with one or more cats in it. So you start your day scrambling to take care of a flood of cats and kittens, but the flood never stops. Hour after hour, all day long, and day after day until your week becomes a blur of cats cats cats, people keep showing up with a feral cat that’s been getting into the trash, or a tame stray who's been hanging around the house as if he might move in someday, or a litter of accidental kittens whose eyes haven’t even opened yet, or a formerly beloved pet cat that the family just can't keep anymore, or sometimes it's the neighbor's cat who been caught fertilizing the wrong garden for the very last time, and on, and on, and on it goes —- for months.
Your public animal shelter employees and the army of volunteers who support them work tirelessly to find good, loving homes for our community's homeless pets, but the sheer number the public drops off at the public shelter each breeding season is overwhelming. We find good homes for hundreds, but thousands more are lost.
There is a simple and inexpensive way to help: please spay/neuter your cats, and if there are strays wandering around your neighborhood, call and we’ll help you get them fixed, too. If you need financial assistance, low-cost spay/neuter certificates are readily available by calling Spay/Neuter Your Pet (SNYP) at 1-541-858-3325, or visit 
http://www.spayneuter.org.
Want to help by adopting a cat or kitten, or by volunteering at the public shelter to help take care of them? If so, please call Friends of the Animal Shelter at 1-541-774-6646, or visit http://www.fotas.org.
e-mail:: fotas@mind.net
Homepage:: http://www.fotas.org
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What about strays 27.05.2007 - 16:46 What about strays? Is there a way to capture strays and get them neutered and then release them again so they don't breed multiple generations? There are a couple of cats around where I work that it would be the humane thing to do but I don't know how to go about it. cat napper> just do it! 29.05.2007 - 17:41 You bet, I've done this many times, and so have many other folks. Get yourself a live trap, and call around to the humane societies and other non-profit aniaml welfare groups to see if you can get some funding. Some vets give big discouints to folk doing this very thing. And a noble thing it is. But far nobler thing, in my opinion, is to find them homes and turn these stray kitties into house cats, preferably ones who remain mostly indoors. One of the biggest threats to songbirds (second to habitat destruction) in America is the outside or feral cats who kill and kill and kill! Also, a tip to cat owners: keep the cats in at dawn and dusk, especially in spring and summer when fledgling birds are trying to get off the ground. good luck! annette> |