In today’s N&O, Dennis Rogers has an interesting column on “Operation Catnip,” an effort in the city of Raleigh to trap, sterilize, vaccinate, and release 1,800 to 2,400 feral cats per year. Mind you, that’s a drop in the bucket – the SPCA of Wake County estimates that there are 57,000 – 85,000 feral cats in the county.
While I’m not wild about the idea of releasing them back to an uncertain fate, I suppose it’s an improvement on keeping them for a while then killing them (euthanize is just another pretty euphemism). What really grabbed me was Rogers’ closing paragraphs:
I wish I had the answer. I don’t want to see any animal destroyed. I also don’t want to see them lost, cold and huddling by the side of a busy road, waiting for death or rescue.
“At least the Operation Catnip people are not just sitting back and complaining about it,” [Mondy] Lamb [of SPCA of Wake County] said. “We all have to do what we can, not because it will solve all the problems, but because it is the right thing to do.”
My project is to find people who cruelly abandon their unwanted pets for the rest of us to take care of. I’d like to leave people like that in the woods for a few nights so they’d know what it is like to be cold, hungry, lost and unloved.
Then I’d sterilize them.
Nicely put.
I like the fact that they’re doing something, though I don’t know how effective these feral spay/neuter projects are. I know my vet friend has some serious misgivings about them– some programs don’t keep the cats around for post-operative observation as long as he’d like, and I shudder to think about what happens to a cat that drops her stitches or something (rare, but it can happen), and is on her own without anyone to take her back to the vet.