The average lifespan of an indoors-only feline is about three times that of cats allowed to roam outdoors, not to mention the notable absence of outdoors-related injury.
Please, always chest-harness your cat if you walk it outdoors. If you won’t do it for the vulnerable wildlife potentially killed by your roaming cat, then please do it for your also-very-vulnerable cat’s sake. … Of course, completely denying one's cat outdoors access should be compensated by giving their feline additional affection/attention.
Meantime, I was greatly saddened when told by the non-profit Surrey Community Cat Foundation via email that, “Our TNR program is not operating. There are no volunteers that are interested in trapping and there is no place to recover the cats after surgery until they can be returned to a site with a feeding station. … Our spay/neuter program is operating and the need for funding is always needed to keep the program running. Always more need than funding available.”
And then leave it to classic human hypocrisy to despise and even shoot or poison those same suffering cats for naturally feeding on smaller prey while municipal governments and many area residents mostly permit the feral cat populations to explode — along with the resultant feline suffering within:
Surrey, B.C. has an estimated 36,000 feral/stray cats, very many of which suffer severe malnourishment, debilitating injury and/or infection. That number was about six years ago. I was informed four years later by the local cat charity (Surrey Community Cat Foundation) that, if anything, their “numbers would have increased, not decreased” since then.
Yet that city's municipal government, as well as some aware yet uncaring residents, did little or nothing to help with the local non-profit trap/neuter/release program, regardless of its (and others’) documented success in reducing the needlessly great suffering. Clearly, along with individual people, society collectively can also be cruel toward felines.
The average lifespan of an indoors-only feline is about three times that of cats allowed to roam outdoors, not to mention the notable absence of outdoors-related injury.
Please, always chest-harness your cat if you walk it outdoors. If you won’t do it for the vulnerable wildlife potentially killed by your roaming cat, then please do it for your also-very-vulnerable cat’s sake. … Of course, completely denying one's cat outdoors access should be compensated by giving their feline additional affection/attention.
Meantime, I was greatly saddened when told by the non-profit Surrey Community Cat Foundation via email that, “Our TNR program is not operating. There are no volunteers that are interested in trapping and there is no place to recover the cats after surgery until they can be returned to a site with a feeding station. … Our spay/neuter program is operating and the need for funding is always needed to keep the program running. Always more need than funding available.”
And then leave it to classic human hypocrisy to despise and even shoot or poison those same suffering cats for naturally feeding on smaller prey while municipal governments and many area residents mostly permit the feral cat populations to explode — along with the resultant feline suffering within:
Surrey, B.C. has an estimated 36,000 feral/stray cats, very many of which suffer severe malnourishment, debilitating injury and/or infection. That number was about six years ago. I was informed four years later by the local cat charity (Surrey Community Cat Foundation) that, if anything, their “numbers would have increased, not decreased” since then.
Yet that city's municipal government, as well as some aware yet uncaring residents, did little or nothing to help with the local non-profit trap/neuter/release program, regardless of its (and others’) documented success in reducing the needlessly great suffering. Clearly, along with individual people, society collectively can also be cruel toward felines.