Apr 13, 2011

The Story of Mittens from the New Yorker (Cat News)

It starts with a posting from back around the first of the year, how this apparently homeless cat shows up at this woman's house, it doesn't get along with her cats but she feeds it anyway... Free Range: Cat Fight : The New Yorker. Then the update on the story; how she takes the homeless cat to the vet. It's microchipped and the residence is 50 miles away. Except that owner basically dumped the cat. Well, you'll read about it here: The Wanderer.

I guess I wanted to post this news article so I could complain. The original owner adopted this cat from a shelter but then wanted to get rid of him because he "peed everywhere" ... You know, getting tom cats fixed will solve that problem. Why don't people bother to fix their cats? If you adopt a fixed male but you have an unfixed one at home, that will start the peeing thing going. It's just nature.

I know I shouldn't be the one to bitch about this. From the beginning I tried to concentrate on getting females in the feral colonies fixed in order to stop the population growth. That meant that sometimes when I trapped males I let them go. And yes, cat people will give me crap about that but you try coming up with a hundred bucks per spay/neuter on my income! Unless you are trying to manage a hundred of them too you just have no idea...

Anyway, since then I've also fixed a lot of the feral males, too. Pets are always fixed. Maybe the bottom line here is that if you are going to adopt animals then learn something about them first and know what you're doing.

1 comment:

  1. Something similar happened to me last year: Getting out of the subway in the middle of midtown, NYC, there was a large black and white cat, obviously very scared. His fur was kind of matted and we thought maybe he'd gotten lost. Three of us took him to a vet around the corner only to find out he was three years old, unfixed, and microchipped. The vet called the people listed as his owners and at first they pleaded ignorance. Then it came out that "maybe" they "used" to have a cat but it was clear they didn't want him back. Happily, one of the women that brought him in with me took him home that night. She managed to find him a forever home the very next day with a woman whose cat had recently passed away. The big guy was so friendly and wound up getting fixed finally- what brings people to dump a cat on the street though? Especially since this is an area with many low-cost or even free spay/neuter options. That I'll never understand.

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