I admit, I am an avid animal lover. Probably an animal fanatic. Most people find passion in sports, music, literature, movies, etc. Kinda normal things. Not me. My passion is animals, cats more specifically. I cannot remember a time in my life not having and loving a cat. Being from a small town in Virginia, I did see a lot of homeless cats. Most of the time these cats hung around homes or barns where I told myself they could find stuff to eat and warm places to sleep at night. Last year I moved to my first big city, Orlando. My very first night here, staying in a hotel before I moved in my apartment, I noticed a group of small kittens behind the hotel. Naturally I wanted to take them all home with me. I figured they were family and just happened to be born nearby or dropped off nearby. I had no idea Orlando, and most of the large cities, had a feral cat problem. In fact, I had never even heard of a feral cat until I saw a news report weeks later addressing the issue and the growing problem for this area. I’m not ashamed to say I cried after seeing that news story. Feral, or homeless, un-socialized, cats, number over 40 million in the US alone. Orlando’s solution: euthanize a large number of these cats. Sure this may seem like a quick fix, but all it does is free up a new space for a large family of more feral cats to move in. It is not solving the problem. With advancing medical technology and care, the lifespan of a domestic cat can be into their 20’s. A feral cat will be lucky to make it past age 2 and 75% of kittens do not make it past 6 months. To me, a great animal lover, this is heartbreaking. These little guys are not even being given a chance at life. To others who may not care about the cats so much, this can become a source of disturbance and disease. The solution is not killing as many cats as possible. More will always come back, not to mention this is inhumane. The solution is to spay and neuter these animals so their numbers do not continue to grow. There are many organizations out there that will do these procedures for free, realizing this is a major problem that needs a viable solution. You may not be a cat fanatic like me, and that’s OK. But as a citizen of whatever community you live in, you have to be concerned with health related issues, which this problem is quickly becoming. Check out these sites to find out ways just a small act can make a huge impact!
http://www.feralcatproject.org/how_help_cats.aspx
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