‘We euthanize cats here’ – SPCA manager

By Colleen Dane
Record Staff Writer
Aug 30 2006

It’s the ugly side of animal shelters — part of the work done there that most people don’t really want to hear or talk about.

It’s no fun either for the staff working there, said Comox Valley SPCA manager Marianne Mitton, but it’s a consequence the community has to know about if people are irresponsible with their animals.

“We euthanize cats here,” said Mitton bluntly during a recent visit to the shelter. “People have got to know.”

While they’re in the business primarily of finding animals a happy home and protecting them from bad ones, the truth is, she said, that unwanted cats often come in too sick, injured or terrified to be adoptable.

With around 325 healthy, functional cats already in residence at the Ryan Road shelter, they don’t have the time, space or money to care for them.

“It’s very hard — very hard,” said Mitton. “But we’re so loaded.”

That message, she said, has a double target.

Hopefully, it will make people take more effort in caring for their pets, but it may also, she said, encourage more people to adopt a shelter cat. As they ramp up to the busiest two months in the shelter — September and October when drop-offs are high and adoptions are low — the SPCA is making a pitch for help, encouraging people to pick up one of their spayed/neutered animals.

The idea being that people can have the pets they want, without contributing to the problem of cat overpopulation.

“Everyone that goes out of here is going to live it’s life out having a good home, and that will be the end of it,” said assistant manager Stephanie Gould. “We want to get the idea out that you have to spay/neuter each of our animals to honour each of their lives.”

An adopted cat, they said, can often be cheaper than a responsibly-treated free one — considering the reduced rates they get on shots and spay-neuter surgeries. They also have the ability to do a juvenile procedure, meaning that cats are available for adoption younger than before.

They’re trying their best, she said, to make the valley’s cat population no longer a problem. They need the help of the community though to carry them through till then.

While Mitton said adamantly that they don’t euthanize animals for space, when they’re overloaded it may not take much to put a cat on “death row.”

“This has got to get better,” she said.

reporter@comoxvalleyrecord.com

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