The latest shelter statistics, presented on page twelve of this issue, suggest that at present about four million cats per year are euthanized for population control about two-thirds of the total number of animals euthanized because they have no homes.
The significance of this number is not only that it is low indeed compared to the best estimates of feline euthanasia published only a couple of years ago, and almost unbelievably low compared to the estimates of 15 years ago. Records of kitten survival in both private homes and feral colonies indicate that only about half of the kittens who are born live long enough to be weaned. Only about half of the kittens who survive that long reach sexual maturity, so that no more than 25% of all the cats born eventually join the breeding population, even without neutering. Further, according to data ANIMAL PEOPLE collected and published in 1992, while conducting the cat rescue project described in our lead feature for this month, only about half of all feral mothers live long enough to bear more than one litter, and only half of those live long enough to bear more than three litters. Our cat rescue records indicate that only one feral mother in a hundred lives longer than three years, so four to five litters appears to be the normal outside limit to feral reproduction.
If non-spayed mothers, both pets and ferals, have on average two litters, and if on average two kittens from each litter survive to sexual maturity, the entire cat surplus could be produced by just one million mothers per year. What's more, the present rate of removal of cats from the feral breeding population via euthanasia, disease, accidents, and neuter/release is such that the homeless cat population may already have been reduced to equilibrium, the point at which removals equal reproduction. The ANIMAL PEOPLE survey of cat rescuers' estimates of the population under their care, published last November, confirmed that this seems to be the case. Although the population of individual colonies varied from 1991 to 1992, the total numbers each year were almost identical.
This suggests we have reached a critical and long awaited juncture in the struggle against pet overpopulation. During the past decade a variety of innovative and aggressive discount neutering, public education, and breed rescue programs have cut the number of euthanasias of dogs and cats by two-thirds and dog euthanasia numbers have fallen even more dramatically than those for cats. We are now at last at a point where elimination of pet overpopulation altogether within the next five to ten years is a reasonable goal.
On the other hand, as our May issue warned with a screaming headline, we are also only a few years away from losing all the ground we've gained if the present momentum is halted. Euthanasia statistics from Los Angeles, in particular, demonstrate that pet overpopulation is not a problem we will permanently "solve"; rather, like the spread of contagious diseases, it is a problem we can contain, and keep contained, so long as we remain aware of the risks and remain dedicated to maintaining preventive measures. As soon as the effort slackens, homeless animal numbers and euthanasia rates skyrocket.
Unfortunately, as our May issue noted, Los Angeles closed its 20-year-old city-operated neutering clinics a year ago due to a civic budget crisis. The immediate result seems to be a drop of five to 10% in the total number of neutering operations performed in Los Angeles, which could quickly translate into an increase of 30% to 60% in the number of homeless animals. At that point the fecundity of dogs and cats is such that the growth of the homeless animal population could become exponential, until the carrying capacity of the often hostile habitat is exceeded and disease and starvation again become the primary population levelers, at tremendous cost in both animal suffering and dollars spent for animal control.
As this issue points out, beginning on page one, model anti-pet overpopulation programs in the cities of Chicago and Macon and the state of New Jersey are also in bad financial trouble, simply because their respective communities are in trouble and animal-related services are politically easier to cut or just not budget than services to voting human beings. The Los Angeles experience, which proved over two decades that every dollar spent for neutering saves ten on animal control, is apparently not enough to convince politicians that cutting anti-pet overpopulation program funding just because it can be cut is penny-wise but pound-foolish.
In the long run, as guest columnist Margaret Anne Cleek argues on page 5, we must convince both politicians and the public that properly funding the most cost-effective approach to animal control population control is as much in the public interest as funding maintenance of roads, sewers, police, and fire prevention service. Pet overpopulation is an "animal issue," yes, but is is also an issue vital to public health and safety, whether the threat comes from the roving dog packs that terrorized many American cities 150 years ago, or from the quiet transmission of parasites.
In the short run, the job is still up to us, all of us, by whatever means we have available. Work on the political front may take many different directions. Our May issue reviewed a wide variety of legislative approaches to pet overpopulation that have been tried here and there, measured the results attributable to each, and pointed out that no single approach appears to be universally and absolutely successful. This month, guest columnists Cleek and Lewis R. Plumb offer more ideas. One way or another, it should be possible to develop an acceptable and feasible anti-pet overpopulation plan for even the most financially stressed communities maybe not the ideal, but something to at least help insure that the problem doesn't get worse.
At the same time, it is equally necessary to continue the many private charitable initiatives that provide the models and inspiration for public efforts. On our first letters page, Friends of Animals advertises one of the oldest and most successful of the anti-pet overpopulation programs that brought us to the present point; on our back cover, the North Shore Animal League is announcing a newly formed alliance with another successful charitable program, Spay USA. Together, FoA, Spay USA, and NSAL's own neutering assistance program for humane societies and animal control agencies are helping to neuter approximately 400,000 pets per year. Such large-scale national efforts are only the most visible part of a quiet ad hoc crusade involving tens of thousands of dedicated volunteers, more than 2,000 sympathetic veterinarians (who comprise approximately 10% of all licensed small-animal veterinarians in the U.S.), and hundreds of smaller local and regional programs, who collectively neuter several million dogs and cats per year at discount rates.
Successful anti-pet overpopulation programs, large and small, have one universal element. From individual humane cat trappers who provide neutering to neighborhood ferals to high-volume clinics like the one operated by the Animal Foundation of Nevada in Las Vegas, which neuters more than 7,500 animals a year, people of compassion and foresight are giving their time and money to correct a situation caused by other people who have neither compassion nor foresight. As Cleek writes, "We all have to pay for the irresponsible, because by definition they won't take the responsibility."
Poverty is one reason why many people still fail to neuter their pets without a nudge from someone else, but it is not the only reason, nor, in our experience, is it the major reason. We gained much of our own hands-on experience with pet overpopulation in the inner city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, one of the poorest neighborhoods relative to the regional cost of living in the whole U.S. and vividly remember elderly women who hadn't even a warm coat to wear in winter pressing $20 bills on us in gratitude that we'd fixed their cats; whole families living in single rooms who would somehow produce a fiver or a ten-spot; rag-tag children who interrupted their games in the street to run knock on doors and locate other cats who needed fixing. For these people, the biggest problem wasn't lack of willingness to pay, even if the means was hard to come by; it was simple lack of access to veterinary clinics, discount or otherwise, in an area with little public transportation and no vets within many miles.
Nor was lack of money the problem for the man with a new house and two sports cars who ordered us to cease catching and fixing ferals who made their homes on his property (although we caught them on the property next door), or for the countless people in wealthy suburbs who asked us to neuter their pets at our expense. Because selfishness and irresponsibility know no class structure, the rest of us must unfortunately continue to subsidize neutering the pets of a certain number of the rich as well as the poor until and unless we can devise a socially acceptable way to hold every pet owner to account.
When we do, enforcement will more likely be through moral approbation than law.