January 25, 2010Comments are closed.cats, mandatory desexing
Thanks to Margaret for the tip!
With the now irrefutable evidence that it’s the unowned cat population that is the major cause of cat shelter overpopulation, and the growing failure of mandatory desexing to reduce shelter kill rates as promised, mandatory desexing advocates are on the hunt for another ‘good reason’ to be allowed to have the legislation they so desire.
So they’ve made up another theoretical benefit;
According to Canobolas Family Pet Hospital veterinarian Geoff Freeth, brawling undesexed cats help spread diseases such as feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV), the cat equivalent of human AIDS.
“The incidences of FIV sits at around 15 to 20 per cent in Australia, although there are places such as Goulburn where 30 per cent of cats have FIV so it’s impossible to know how many local cats have the disease,” he said.
“The majority of people see it as the responsible thing to get their cats desexed, however there is a small percentage of people who don’t do it because they’re lazy or lack education (on the issue).”
Dr Freeth says feral cats are also an increasing problem in the region and while desexing won’t have an immediate impact on feral cat numbers, he believes there will be long-term benefits.
I really don’t understand how the straw man argument that cat owners are to blame for ongoing feral cat problems continues to be given credence. Of course there are health and behavioural benefits to cats if they are desexed; that was never under debate. But oversimplifying the issue by suggesting that targeting ‘lazy and uneducated owners’ is the key to curing all of the ills of cat kind, is just so, so unhelpful, keeping the public all looking to the government for a legislative solution, rather than empowering them to take genuine action that would reduce the number of homeless cats.
We need to stop all these efforts to ‘get’ owners. And start real discussion about how we can ‘get’ some solutions to the actual problem – a large population of breeding, unowned animals.
