I know! And like I said, it’s the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version. This was an ongoing soap opera of epic proportions that I received updates on semi-weekly, including me shouting “Why doesn’t one of you (his siblings) DO anything!?” at my mother on a regular basis. There WAS intervention, or at least attempted intervention, but to get into detail would probably require its own thread.
Yes, and we in rescue do it all the time. As long as the potential mom isn’t too more than 30 days along, we will abort during a spay procedure and our vets are happy to do it.
From the HSUS:
One unspayed female can be responsible for bringing lots of other cats in to the world in under one year (this is just counting the females she has breeding, not the contributions of her male offspring).
Muffy has 6 kittens, three are female.
She gets pregnant again in 4 months and has another 6 kittens, again 3 are female.
Repeat for a third litter in one year, three more females.
Each of those females can breed in less than six months. The first three females are young enough to get 2 breeding cycles in in less than a year, the second litter only gets in one cycle. The each produce on average three more females. Do you see where this goes?
Spay and Neuter is not just for everyone else. I deal with the aftermath of all these “unplanned” litters every single day.
Folks, I agree the kitties should have been spayed/neutered, but so does she, and intends to get it taken care of tout suite. I really think all this vitriol and recrimination is unnecessary in this case. Well, and indeed any case, because the tone evangelic spay/neuter people take can be off-putting sometimes. Maybe she was careless (and lazy by her accounts) but that doesn’t make her worthy of the top-ten most wanted by the FBI (or even America’s Most Wanted–the tv show!)
Any potential home taken up by an ‘unplanned’ litter of kittens could have potentially gone to a kitten sitting in the shelter. So yes, in a sense it does impact the shelter.
I don’t know about the others, but I’m so vehemently against things like this because I experienced the aftermath in more than one way. I’ve taken in countless ‘unwanted’ litters when I was working in veterinary medicine to keep them from being euthanized. When I was training to be a vet tech I did a brief internship at the local state run shelter. I was there in the middle of kitten season. They were so inundated with cats and kittens that they were keeping them in the same room they euthanized animals in and temporarily stored their bodies. I’ve seen BARRELS full of dead cats and kittens. I’ve walked into a room unaware that a litter of kittens has just been euthanized and went to pet the ‘sleeping’ ones only to discover the truth. I’ve assisted in a spay on a pregnant female cat because like most others, it was her only chance of survival. Pregnant cats don’t get adopted. They get euthanized unless a volunteer from the shelter offers to foster them or they’re considered ‘adoptable’ and are spayed. This unfortunately doesn’t happen often.
This is all because of people who don’t feel it’s necessary or that it’s ‘cruel’ to spay and neuter their pets. That’s why I’m what you consider an ‘evangelical’ spay and neuter person. If more people saw the dirty truth to what “just one litter” produces, I’m sure they’d feel the same way.
Apologies for the tone and “insult,” but not the sentiment.
Joe
I’m not excusing the vitriol, but I can explain it.
The vitriol is caused by frustration. This is a constantly repeated story.
Every adult human understands where kittens come from, and everyone in this country (the US) is exposed to the knowledge of what should be done about it. Yet over and over and over and over again we see the stories about not getting around to it / can’t afford it / am opposed to birth control / whatever, usually accompanied by barely-concealed excitement over the impending new kittens. It’s enough to make a reader think the writer actually wanted kittens all along and the rest is just excuse-making; which, although it makes us sarcastic in our replies, may be kinder than making assumptions about the writer’s ability to connect cause-and-effect.
It’s very frustrating to see so much suffering (and so much unnecessary expense to shelters and rescuers) recur over and over, caused by blithe or careless humans who certainly know better.
Yes. I love kittens, as I stated above. I think that kittens are one of the niftiest things on earth. But I can really only cope with about three cats at a time, and my cats tend to live at least 15 years. Most people can only cope with having two or three cats at a time. Cats can outbreed the number of homes available in just a year.
That reminds me, I need to make a donation to my local animal shelter. But I won’t go into the adoption rooms. I always cry when I see so many cats and kittens who desperately need a home, and my home is already full.
Until she tells us the kittens will be given away, it doesn’t.
From what it seems, they have homes lined up for them already:
Unless she’s talking about taking in the kittens herself, then those kittens are the cause of death of an equal number of kittens in the shelter.
I know this is getting into Great Debates and I want to tread lightly and ask as neutrally as I can: With humans, a distinction is made between terminating a life before birth and after birth. Given that kittens aren’t children, and the analogy may or may not hold, what is the distinction made between a spay that terminates a litter, and euthanizing kittens?
I think I know what I will be seeing in my nightmares tonight. Dear god, how do people deal with this on a day to day basis at a shelter?
I think it’s that it’s less squiky to kill them before they’re born than to do it when they’re cute little frolicking things.
It takes a special kind of person. And I don’t mean ‘special’ in the sarcastic, demeaning way. The time I spent in the shelter (about three months off and on) was the hardest, most emotionally draining times I can recall. The people who worked there as a profession I held in the highest respect. At the end of my internship, it was hinted very strongly that I’d be welcome there once I graduate. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the emotional and mental strength to work there.
And it wasn’t just the euthanasias. Seeing pets being dropped off by their owners for being “too big” (a saint bernard), or “too hyper” (a lab puppy), or the worst ones…cats in their upper teens, in the golden years of their lives, abadoned for being “too old”. Yes. People brought their cats to the shelter for being too old after caring for them their whole lives.
One factual difference is that with the spay/ termination, at least you know the spay got done.
We were a “3-cat limit” house with “a slot for a stray”. Well, that slot was filled, and then another slot was filled. All because people don’t spay or neuter. It is the first thing we do when we take a new one in. It makes me nuts that people don’t consider this the first priority of pet ownership.
I don’t know what we’ll do the next time a stray shows up. We really don’t have space for another, but I suspect we’ll just have to make room.
Of course it impacts the shelter! Are these kittens born sterile? How does **Kricket **know the adopting families will be any more responsible with their pets than he/she was? Kittens to adopted cats don’t just happen; they’re the product of irresponsible pet-ownership.
Reread Minnie Luna’s post. Yes, those of us who understand the problem are unashamedly frustrated and irritated at the attitudes shown in some of the posts in this thread. :eek: 
I can’t respond fully because my viewpoint is so different from yours, so I’ll just leave it at that.
It’s hard. The easiest way to not lose sleep at night is to tell yourself that you are doing the best you can with the resources you have.
You save the ones you can save and try your best with everyone else. You implement spay and neuter programs, free vaccination clinics and free microchip clinics in your area so that you can reach more people and let them know you are there to help. You go to all the local schools and reach out to the local Girl and Boy Scouts and educate children about homeless pets and what they can do to help. You start a foster program to get at least some of the animals in the shelter into a home environment while they are awaiting adoption.
You partner with all the local no-kill and breed-specific rescues you can and try to move the animals you can to them ASAP, where you know they will be safe from the “blue juice”. I can’t tell you how many animals have been saved by partnerships like this.
My shelter operates on a shoe-string budget. If vet care for an animal is going to be too expensive, they will often euthanize to save money. The philosophy is that $1000 can better help 5 other homeless animals get shots, fixed and adopted. I can’t tell you how often us volunteers/Board Members will pool money to pay for vet care for an animal deemed “too sick” by the shelter.
Officially, I volunteer at the shelter about 5 hours a week. Unofficially, it is more like 20-30. I chair the Fund Raising Committee and sit on the Board of Directors. I have volunteers calling/emailing and asking for help in getting certain animals out all the time. I have employees calling and bitching about the conditions at the shelter and that something new is broken and they need a new one.
We finally got permission from the County to build a new shelter and now we need permission from the Orphan’s Court to the access funds that were set aside for this purpose. It never ends.
I organize 3-4 large Fund Raisers a year and 5-6 smaller ones and I don’t get paid. Myself and a couple of other Board Members used our own money to go to a conference on Shelter Management to learn how to better lead the community in making our area “No-Kill” in the future. I’ve traveled to “model shelters” (on my own dime) across the US to talk to them and to try and learn about what they are doing.
In short, the conditions at my local shelter will not improve until the citizens are educated and actually help keep the homeless pet population down by spaying and neutering their own animals.
If you think overpopulation isn’t real or spaying a pregnant female is somehow “wrong”, visit your local shelter in the next couple of months. Kitten season (April/May through September/October) is coming and see how many cute little kittens are euthed each day.
Sorry for the long post, but it is an issue very close to my heart.
And yet, to a lot of people, it’s the shelters who are the bad guys, “because they kill kitties and puppies”. My insane uncle, who I referenced earlier in the thread, refused for over a year to take any of the absolutely unreal amount of kittens, adolescent, and adult cats he had to the Humane Society, for the absolutely accurate perception that they would probably euthanize most of them (over 20 cats who’d never been socialized to anyone but him? That’s a no-brainer on a “kill shelter”'s part).
It’s a sad fact of life that far too many people prefer to shut their eyes and ears to. There are just too many cats and dogs (especially cats) being born out there to be able to keep them all alive, especially for an organization that’s often scrabbling for money. Yes, there are no-kill shelters, and most of them are wonderful, but some of them are worse than euthanasia, as the people running them try to take in as many animals as possible and quality of care necessarily declines.
It’s a problem with no neat, compact, perfect solution, which is what most people want there to be.
I’ve never seen how many kittens are euthed…but I do know that there’s an awful lot of kittens that roam the streets during this time. And the Humane Society is packed to the rafters with kittens. Around May or June of last year, my husband and I went to the local Humane Society to pick out another cat to share our lives. We happened to find one cat each, and I jokingly asked if there was a buy one/get one free sale. Since I was taking an older cat (four years old, and just as lovable as a kitten) as well as a kitten, they said SURE. I ended up making a donation in the amount of an adoption fee, anyway, so we came out even. This HS will sometimes also have a “Mother’s Day” promotion, to find home for the momcats as well as their kittens around Mother’s Day.