Stop letting kittens have kittens

Sheridan Gaunt,the spokeswoman for Peterborough Cats Protection

It doesn’t matter how hard we work to raise awareness of the need to neuter or spay your cat, it seems the message continues to be ignored.

Every charity is at maximum capacity with long waiting lists of stray/abandoned cats needing help. We continue to be overwhelmed with calls to the helpline from the public finding pregnant cats, mum and kittens, or those that can’t re-home their own kittens that have bred indiscriminately.

Across the 32 adoption centres and 250 voluntary run branches in the UK, we help to neuter 159,000 cats and kittens a year. Just one unneutered female can produce 18 kittens a year and can be responsible for producing 20,000 descendants in just five years!

These figures are increasing annually, making our job, almost impossible at times to ever see any real progress in this area. People need to wake up and accept responsibility for their pets. Our feline friends don’t understand about safe sex or the birds and the bees, but we humans do! SO, stop letting kittens have kittens!

It is imperative you neuter your cat, as young as four months of age or sooner, before the reach puberty. 90% of the teenage mums we see in our branch are all under a year, some just six months of age, still a kitten them- selves.

Neutering male cats is equally as important. This will stop them spraying which leaves an awful pungent smell that is near on impossible to get rid of, stops them straying, fighting and catching a nasty disease called FIV – which is similar to HIV in humans.

We already offer assisted neutering help for those on low income or benefits, however, in order to help the Peterborough community of cat owners, we have partnered with Vets4Pets to run a ONE off neuter/spay offer of £10 per cat.

The offer will run until the end of September, with no other criteria than that you must live in the PE1-PE8 area. Anyone out- side this area must contact their local Cats Protection branch.

We urge all cat owners to ACT NOW and contact us on 0345 371 2750 or email peterboroughcatsprotection@gmail.com to book their place.