Empty cages and more importantly, empty incinerators. The future of animal sheltering is rejecting the notion that killing is kindness.
Best Friends Animal Society – It’s not every day we get to share a photo of empty shelter kennels! Recently, the City of Albuquerque celebrated the one year anniversary of not killing a single community cat! We tip our ear, er, hats to those who made this lifesaving effort possible through trap/neuter/return. READ MORE: http://bit.ly/FeralCatDay
And how do we get there? Turns out it’s not magic – it’s maths…
Cat management has to evolve to include a ‘third’ option for cats… other than fully owned, OR dead in a shelter.
This is what No Kill programs advocate.
And it works.
Maddie’s Institute – Community cats being spayed and neutered at the Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida.
This team can desex 150-300 cats per day. Over a year can you even imagine what that does to the stray breeding population? It decimates it.
If you want to find out more. If you genuinely want the solutions to killing cats in shelters. See
“Shelter Crowd Control: Keeping Community Cats Out of Shelters”
It’s a free webcast with Julie Levy, DVM, Director of Maddie’s® Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida and founder of Operation Catnip, a cat spay/neuter program in Gainesville, Florida.
And check out The Secret Cat Society for a local community engagement model.
If we know ‘catch and kill’ doesn’t work to reduce cat populations in urban areas (which we do), and we know large-scale, targeted desexing programs in urban areas do reduce cat populations (which we do), how can we in good conscience continue to support spending our animal management dollars in those areas on rounding up thousands of cats and killing them?
