From WOAI:
The city is making a major change to meet its goal of having a “no-kill” shelter by 2012. In less than a week, Animal Care Services (ACS) will no longer accept trapped cats.
ACS receives close to 200 cats a month that either have to be killed or adopted out. Starting in April, the cats will be spayed or neutered, and then returned to where they came from.
As an unintended consequence, I think people will be trapping stray cats less, and possibly killing them more. Well, at least the shelter will be "no-kill."
5 comments:
:( It kills me to think of people killing innocent animals because the city can't house them anymore! How is it that on one hand, our city freaks out when they find out about some guy out there torturing/killing animals for the thrill of it... yet they hand them over to neighborhoods of killers? Seems like if they'd have thought to "fix" animals LONG ago, we'd have less strays to begin with... Or they're planning on making a lot more charges of animal cruelty... but I'm confused, where will they keep the people??? Aren't our jails full, too?
Yeah, making local shelters "no-kill" is going to produce a lot of unintended consequences. (I've already touched on this a little bit here.)
Really, does the city think people will accept this happily? How many people are going to want to rid their neighborhoods of nuisance strays by trapping the cats (on their own time and own dime), taking them in to the city (using their own gas), picking them up later, and then letting them loose again in their neighborhoods? I just don't think many people will think this is an ideal situation, and I have a feeling a lot of strays will be killed on the sly.
This disturbs me quite a lot... just the general idea of it all. I don't understand why people won't get their animals fixed... there's no excuse when there are places that will do it for free! I mean, I waited about a year before I spayed my cat, but she's an indoor only cat and precautions are taken so there's no chance she could get out (largely because I'm a very overprotective mommy). Ugh... I hope they at least take action against people that try and take matters into their own hands, because it's not an excuse to do so.
Actually spaying/neutering feral cats and returning them is a common practice in various states. One reason is that usually removing the feral colony just opens it for another group to move in. By returning spayed/neutered animals it eliminates new colonies from moving in and elimantes new babies being born. Eventually the colony wil die out...
;)
Starwarrior, that may be common in other states, but how many of them put the burden of doing all of that and paying for it on the individual citizens? Such a program may be a success if the city handles it, but San Antonio seems to want individual people to trap the cats, take them in, spay/neuter them, and then return them to their neighborhoods -- all on their own time and using their own money.
>:-P
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