Most of us deal with this on a daily basis during the warm months of early spring and summer. May used to be my favorite month of the year until I became involved in rescue and discovered that “Free Kittens” signs blossom as readily as tulips and daffodils in spring’s warm weather.
This article, in The Columbus Dispatch, highlights what most of us know. There are too many kittens and not enough homes. One estimate that I have read says that only 1 in 4 kittens will find a home.
While I was reading this story over lunch today in a local Plain City restaurant, a drugstore customer approached me and began telling me about the mother cat and kittens he was caring for in his garage. He informed me that he would not let them starve, but after reading the newspaper article, he held little hope of getting them into one of the local shelters, where he knew they would just be euthanized.
“I won’t let them be killed,” he said, “So they can just go back out and live in the neighborhood with the other cats.”
I told him I’d call him in a month when the kittens were weaned and we’d get the mother cat in to be spayed and work on homes for the kittens.
I hear stories like this every day and it gets to be very overwhelming.
Spaying and neutering is the only answer to the problem of “so many kittens without a home.” I hope someday, articles like this will be a mystery to people who value a limited supply of kittens and who always fix the strays in their neighborhoods.
Here is a link to the June 10 article by Ben Wolford: The Columbus Dispatch article, “So Many Kittens Without a Home.”
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