Responsible cat owners needed
It’s an overpopulation problem that grows worse with each passing year and it is one governed by a single grim reality. When it comes to unwanted cats in Canada, if owners refuse to neuter or spay them, animal shelters are forced to slay them.
That that simple cruel logic continues to escape so many people is sad and confounding. Worse, it is creating a “cat crisis” across this country, according to a new study form the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies. The report finds the animal sheltering system is at, or dangerously over, capacity to care for the cats that arrive at their doors.
Cats are twice as likely as dogs to end up abandoned at a shelter or rescue and far more likely to be euthanized due to long stays and illness. Some of them are surrendered pets, others are found as strays roaming the streets. In a typical case in August, for example, the Edmonton Humane Society took custody of six kittens found abandoned inside a backpack in a back alley. A month earlier, more than 100 cats were seized from a westend home, and most of them had to be put down.
The data reveals that cats entering the sheltering system have less than a one per cent chance of being reunited with their families compared with dogs, which have a 30 per cent chance.
“Less than half of cats admitted to shelters are adopted,” the report states. “The majority are euthanized. Many never make it to a shelter, and die painful deaths outside.”
Some 60,000 cats were euthanized across Canada in 2011, and 20 per cent of those were kittens.
The Edmonton Humane Society, which says 2012 has been one of the worst years ever for abandoned animals, has 135 cats available for adoption just now, and things will only get worse in the spring when litters of kittens are born and abandoned. If you searched for cats under Edmonton Kijiji just before Christmas, more than 500 listings popped up, almost half of them offering cats for free.
Feline lovers might see some good news in the report’s finding that there are an estimated 10.2 million owned cats in Canada, underscoring their status as a far more popular pet choice than dogs. But the concurring problem arises from the horrendous number of cats that are abandoned, lost or homeless each year. Based on data drawn from shelters and pounds across the country, the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies projects that more than 600,000 homeless cats in Canadian shelters did not find new homes in 2011.
More than a third of the cats sent to shelters were surrendered due to housing issues, including landlord conflicts and pet prohibitions in rental agreements, with countless others arriving there simply because the animal took up more time or responsibility than its owners felt they could provide.
There’s no denying it — the homeless cat problem in Canada is mainly due to irresponsible pet owners letting their cats roam free without being spayed or neutered, and without identification. Spaying and neutering, licensing, micro-chipping and keeping cats indoors represent responsible pet ownership at its best but that’s a practice all too rarely encountered in Canada, and that reality is leaving shelters the routine wretched choice of killing too many animals too quickly or keeping them alive for as long as possible in impossibly overcrowded conditions.