http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/story/4081961p-4681500c.html
New shelter overburdened with stray cats

Fri Nov 23 2007

Unscripted / Janet Stewart

You know that big beautiful new shelter the Winnipeg Humane Society just built? It's already full to capacity with cats. Already.
Two weeks ago, people brought in 200 cats. Last week, another 114.

We have to get our cat overpopulation problem under control.

The Humane Society could squeeze more cats in. It could shove several in each crate and pile them to the ceiling in the garage like it used to in the old place, but the point of the new building was to have a HUMANE Humane Society, where animals wouldn't be as crowded and stressed out.

To make things worse, Kenora's SPCA is closing. Too little funding. It's sending 24 dogs to Winnipeg. Making more room for them leaves less room for cats. Plus more people are bringing in stray dogs from the North. That's a good thing -- it saves the dogs from dog shoot days -- but still, there's that room and resources problem again.
We can't keep doing things the same old way and expect the outcome to change. Isn't that a definition of madness?

If you have a cat, get it spayed or neutered. If you can't afford it the Humane Society has subsidy programs to help. Call them. Ask. The next time your children want to go look at the kitties in the pet store, take them to a shelter instead. Adopt there, please (Sorry, pet stores, but this is an emergency. If they don't get adopted, ultimately they get killed.) And remember, pets are lots of work. If you adopt one, you are making a commitment to try to keep it healthy for the rest of its life. They're worth the work. They give back more love than you can ever give them, but they are not disposable. You can't trade them in on a cuter model when your kids get bored. That may sound harsh, but it happens.

There are pet stores out there that take animals from the Humane Society. We love them. We also love the great no-kill shelters that help carry the heavy load. But here's the thing: When they're full to the rafters, they can say no. Who takes the overflow? The Humane Society. They deal with the very sick ones, the mean ones, the old ones. They don't like to talk about it, but they do euthanize cats. They have to. Someone has to walk through overflowing areas and pick out which cats have the least chance of being adopted. Nice job, eh? Imagine how that would feel.

There are 20,000 feral cats in Winnipeg. The Humane Society says the key to getting that population under control lies in three letters -- TNR -- trap, neuter and release.

You do the trapping, with a trap you borrow from the Humane Society. Any feral cat you catch, you take to the Humane Society. They spay or neuter it for free, and you take it back and release it where you caught it. One less cat making kittens.

To Tim Dack, the R part of TNR doesn't make much sense. Remember he's the guy from Winnipeg's Animal Services. He hears complaint after complaint about nuisance cats, owned or feral. Releasing a cat back into the wild won't keep it from bothering people.

Tim Dack is running out of patience. He says in the new year the city must come up with a way to deal with cat overpopulation. He tells me he doesn't know what tack it might take, but he says we need to "think outside the box".

Dack brings up the idea of licensing pet cats, as the city licenses dogs. At least then, if you caught one on the loose, you'd know who it belonged to.

Council voted down the idea of licensing cats a couple of years ago. Some cat owners called it a cash grab. Others said the bylaw would be impossible to enforce.
It's tough to get people to think of cat overpopulation as a serious problem. Just ask the person at the Humane Society who has to choose which cat goes and which one gets a second chance.

Two columns in a row about cats. I'll get off my soapbox now. Thanks for listening.