27 October 2009
If you see a dog walking down the street without it's owner, you would at least probably notice it. If you are an animal lover or maybe just a concerned citizen, you might stop the car and attempt to secure the dog before it gets hurt. You might also call animal control so that they could attempt to catch the stray dog if you were unable to do it. If you saw a stray cat roaming down your street would attempt to catch it? The realistic answer is absolutely not! You might be more inclined to leave it some food! You are also highly unlikely to call animal control unless the feline is yowling in your backyard at night, pooping in your rose bushes, or spraying all over your back door! Or worse yet, having kittens underneath your shed or in your attic, or inside a an infrequently used vehicle, etc.
Love them or hate them, community cats are not simply going to go away. Las Vegas is at the nexus of a perfect storm for feline overpopulation. We have a highly transient population that lives a very disposable lifestyle. Our weather conditions allow female cats to have as many as four litters per year. Multiple plentiful food sources for cats exist which can never be completely eliminated. Very few if any predators control cat populations in urban areas.
Cats are so disposable here, that an owned cat, has less than a 3% chance of being recovered by it's owner if it ends up at a shelter. Last year the over 18,000 cats were euthanized which works out to 50 cats a day, every single day of the year! As frightening as the intake and euthanasia numbers for Clark County are, the more frightening fact is that they've been growing by 10% a year for a number of years!
It's estimated that some 200-500,000 community cats exist in the Vegas Valley. Some believe there could actually be closer to 750,000! As long as there are so many community cats, it wouldn't matter if we had 100% spay/neuter rate amongst owned cats. A percentage of kittens from unspayed mom's is always going to find it's way into rescue and adoption groups. Many of those that end up in shelters become fodder for the needle.
The numbers of community cats are so large, we will never be able to either rescue nor euthanize our way out of this problem. The community cats need to be managed, which means in a nutshell: counting them, fixing them, and monitoring them afterwards. If you feed community cats outside, register as a feral colony caretaker with the Central Sponsor at http://www.clarkcountyferalcats.org. The Central Sponsor will not share your information with animal control. Ear tipped cats belonging to a registered colony have some protections under the 10.06 ordinance. If they are trapped by a citizen and end up at the county shelter, the Central Sponsor is contacted. If the cat can be matched to a colony/caretaker where it was trapped, it will be released back to the caretaker for $17 (the cost of a microchipping and vaccination update) to be returned to its colony. Need help managing your colony? We offer training classes in TNR, loan traps, and help connect caretakers with low-cost or grant funded spay/neuter slots. We are also working on ways to provide caretakers with food at considerable cost savings!
What other ways can you help? Spay/neuter all owned pets. Register your owned cats and dogs with the county. Registrations allow them to collect better information on pet ownership in the county. If you are registering a new car, get "Animal Appreciation" license plates. The money collected from pet registrations and spay/neuter license plates is used to support county spay/neuter programs.
Don't let your cat roam outside, or if you do (in violation of county ordinances) have them microchipped and consider having their ear tipped. If I catch an eartipped cat in a trap, I will release it shortly if not immediately. If there is no tipped ear, the cat is at best getting a couple of days cooling out in a trap and a ride to the clinic, and at worst, anesthesia and surgery to discover it's already been neutered! If you're pissed off neighbor traps your cat, they could end up at the county animal shelter. If your cat does disappear, check the shelter to see if it's there! They are only required to keep you cat for 72-hours so time is of the essence if your cat gets taken to the shelter as a stray.
Consider donating money or volunteering for an organization that helps community or feral cats, or supports spay/neuter programs. As I stated before, we will never euthanize or adopt our way out of the community cat overpopulation problem. Let's manage them through Trap Neuter Return (TNR) which has proven to be effective in so many communities.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment