My partner Amy and I are cat people. Until last summer, we had two–we adopted a third and a fourth attached herself to us a couple of months after we moved into a new house with a jungle-y back yard. All of our cats are fixed.
There’s also a large feral cat population in our neighborhood–our third cat was a member of it, along with her two kittens, until we adopted her and convinced a friend to take the kittens. She was pregnant again when we captured her, which meant we had to have a kitten abortion performed. No, I don’t feel guilty about that in the slightest. Why?
Because there’s an estimated 60 million feral cats in the US right now. Some days, it feels like a quarter of them have taken up residence in our back yard. These aren’t pets, they aren’t friendly either to humans or each other, and they’re usually infested with fleas and parasites. They live unnecessarily short, brutal lives.
And they exist, in large part, because owners aren’t responsible. This morning, before we’d even gotten our first cups of coffee down, we’d trapped a new arrival in the feral cat trap we bought with our income tax refund–that we got a refund at all tells you a bit about our income level–and we took it to the open-all-weekend veterinary clinic that’s a twenty-minute drive away to be fixed. This isn’t our cat, mind you. We hadn’t even seen it (we’re not sure of the gender, even) prior to a couple of days ago, but we’re the ones making sure it’ll be the last to pass along its genes to another generation. Including the three in homes now, this will be the sixth such cat we’ve gotten fixed and vaccinated for rabies in the last eight months, and we hope to get the other three or four regulars who inhabit the back yard.
But even if we live here the rest of our lives and keep up this pace, it won’t matter, even in our neighborhood, if people don’t take responsibility for their pets. Don’t give me any crap about how you’re changing the animal’s nature by controlling its ability to reproduce. We’re humans–we’ve done that to animals since the beginnings of civilization. It’s called domestication. The second you take responsibility for feeding an animal, you’re responsible for controlling its reproduction as well. Stop depending on your neighbors to pick up your slack.
