Especially in the case of TNR surgeries, there is no way to know the cat is pregnant until she’s already sedated and prepped and incision made. NO ONE is going to be like “whoopsie, let’s just close up and do this all again later when she’ll probably be pregnant again, when we trap her again, and she’s already let a feral litter out that we have to trap, too! Oh, let’s count them now since she’s opened up for full abdominal surgery so we know how many we’ll need to trap in a couple months!” Even if you can tell she’s lactating in the trap/during prep, is she pre- or post-partum? Places I know doing TNR don’t have xray available and even if they did, they’re not getting through 30 surgeries taking that kind of time, and who’s paying for that?
Not to mention the part where the process of surgical prep with the drugs used - including the routine FVRCP vaccine - are likely cause her to abort on her own within a few days anyway.
I feel like you may be picturing cute little furball healthy post-birth kittens being pulled out one by one during the spay. Here’s a pic of a spay abort. The uterus is extracted intact. These are not viable fetuses. [spoiler]Kitten Sausage! - Imgur
More and more I’m coming to the conclusion humans shouldn’t live in areas where they can’t survive if the power fails.
Okay, maybe not quite that stringent: if you’ll be able to survive for at least a week without power, okay. But if you’d die of heat stroke or freeze within 48 hours of losing power? GET OUT while you can.
It’s the late stage pregnancies to which I object. Or course, it can be impossible to tell whether a cat in the early stages is pregnant and I don’t expect one to be closed up mid-surgery. I’ve done more reading on it and it doesn’t appear that these pretty much fully-formed kittens are euthanized-they’re just thrown in the bucket under the table. How does that not cause suffering the suffering we’re trying to prevent? I could stomach the whole thing if there were more of an emphasis on *humanely *“discarding” these kittens.
I’ve seen surgeons toss the uterus, but I’ve seen other veterinarians inject a barbiturate into a uterine vessel. I think the reason some do not is economic.
They’re enclosed in the uterus and have received all the knock-out drugs the mom got, including the efffects of the gas. They’ve never taken a breath, and remaining in the uterus never exposed to air and already with ketamine, diazepam. buprenorphine and isoflurane in their system, they’re never conscious.
