June is Adopt A Cat Month. First launched in 1998 by the American Humane Association, it’s a time to remind folks that this month more than three million cats and kittens will enter an animal shelter, and too many of them will not make it out alive, just because there are not enough homes.
There are a couple of reasons for the high cat population. One is that cats are very prolific. A female cat can have four or more litters of kittens in one year. Most of those litters will have four kittens, but some litters could have as many as seven or eight kittens, and occasionally even more. So a female can could have fifteen to twenty kittens – or more - in a year.
That is one reason cat owners are encouraged to have their female pets spayed as soon as possible. Spaying is one sure way to limit the growth of the cat population. It also has other benefits for the female cat, because it eliminates the risk of uterine and ovarian cancer, and drastically reduces the risk of breast cancer.
We have a cat that we found in the woods behind our house. With time and patience, gradually we convinced her to accept food and water. As she came closer to us, we could see that her ear was “tipped” – the top was flat across, done by the veterinarian who spayed her. Veterinarians who spay and neuter stray and feral cats will “tip” the ear of the females because there is no other way to determine if the female animal has been surgically altered. In Tuscaloosa we are fortunate to have TSNIP, a local organization that is very active at trapping stray and feral cats and surgically altering them so they do not reproduce.
If you have a cat that has not been “fixed”, or if you are considering adopting one, do not postpone having the surgery done. It could help to reduce the shelter population and make it easier for cats in the shelter to get adopted. After all, we all like a happy ending, when we’re speaking of pets!
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