Today I want to write about cats, and the craziness that is lately the cat problem in Spain and I am sure that also in the rest of Europe, not so long ago the numbers of cats straying in the streets was not so big but lately the numbers have gone so high that at this moment the population of feral cats in our cities is enormous , becoming a real problem for the health , many of them are sick, for the environment, many birds got killed by these cats, and the accidents, or the excrements , the cats like to use the sand in the playground sandboxes, with all the problems that it can cause. This entire demographic explosion has become because of two reasons:
The first one is the stupid thought that the cats can
survive by themselves, ok the statistics are clear; the medium life of a feral
cat is one and a half years and the normal life of a domestic cat can be 15
years old, so this thought is ridiculous.
The second one is a question of resources, before the
animal welfare people started to feed the feral cats, Mother Nature that is
very intelligent will allow the mother to breed one or two kitten, so the
numbers are under control, like always, we, the human beings we interfere with
the animals and we modify their way of leaving, so now the resources for them
are more or less unlimited and it means the growth of the population is out of
control and it has become a real problem.
Obviously what are, in my opinion the solutions, well
mainly one to have all the population of feral cats, perfectly castrated or sterilized
and in good health conditions what means, several steps:
- We need to catch the feral cats, so we need to use cat traps, but for that we need the collaboration of the people in the surroundings, because they must stop feeding the cats, so it is obvious that previous to any intervention a consensus is needed, sometimes we have the problem that the people in the surroundings don’t agree and even they have stolen our traps.
- Making a blood test for several diseases like Leukemia , Feline aids and if possible PIF, if the cat is positive, my opinion is that they should be euthanized, even when I know that many people don’t agree with me about that, I am absolutely strict about this, even thinking that we could euthanize a fake positive, I prefer to take that risk better that allowing sick animals alive and free, their death will be horrible because they start having any kind of infections and they will start losing weight and at the end they will make themselves invisible , so all this people that are against euthanasia cannot see them and they don’t feel guilty for this horrible death, also these animals are a reserve of these diseases.
- The healthy ones, they get vaccinated, dewormed and sterilized.
- We release these healthy cats again, where they came from.
- The feeders will start their work properly done, been always careful with new cats that could appear for having them under control, by the way the released cats will have a piece of the right ear cut , so they are easy to identify.
- We repeat the process from time to time to ensure that this colony is absolutely under control.
This is our point of view and this is how we work,
whoever agrees with us and want to work with us is absolutely welcome. Kisses
licks and hugs from all of us. FermÃn
