Posts tagged "neuter"

Belgium is getting crowded. The country is home to 11 million people, and 1.7 million cats, the Guardian U.K. reports. Some 37,000 of those animals are strays that wind up in shelters and, often, are put down.

Enter the Multi-Annual Cat Plan 2011-2016. Over the next five years, the Belgian government plans to fix nearly all of the country's kitties, notes the Guardian U.K. The first part of the plan is that all shelter cats will be spayed or neutered. Later, cat sellers will have to comply with the new law. And you can forget about the "Kittens for Sale" ads on the street corner. Selling kittens through small ads or bulletin-board notices will be banned.

In the last phase of the plan, all cat owners will be required to register and sterilize their cats. Breeders and owners of pedigreed pets like Siamese will be exempt from sterilization, however, the Guardian reports.

Most animal welfare groups in Belgium are optimistic about the new law, but others are skeptical. "Pet owners will rebel and refuse to do it," Marleen Meerssemean, who helps run a rescue service for injured wild animals, told the Guardian. "And this wouldn't be Belgium if people did not find a back door."

But with so many felines prowling the country's town squares -- and overrunning the shelters -- it's clear that something needs to be done.

"We are confronted with a dramatic situation," Jan Eyckmans of the Belgian health ministry told the Guardian. The plan, he says, is Belgium's best chance "to halt the increase in the numbers of strays and cats collected in shelters."

What do you think? Should spaying and neutering cats be mandatory?

In a group of animal lovers or "The Price is Right" hosts, it's easy to see a passion for adopting homeless pets and controlling the pet population. But thanks to a national survey commissioned by PetSmart Charities, we now have an insight to the overall national perceptions and opinions about pets.

Among 1,000 new pet owners (those who acquired a dog or cat in the past year), the study found that only 24 percent were adopted from shelters. This means a whopping 76 percent of pets were received from sources other than shelters, with the primary reason being a desire for a specific purebreed.

Interestingly, when those who purchased pets were asked what might motivate them to choose shelter adoption instead, knowing that "millions of purebred animals end up in shelters" was found to be the least motivating factor.

Despite Bob Barker's tireless encouragement, the study also found that nearly half of people who have acquired unsterilized pets in the last year haven't fixed them. As a result, more unwanted pets are being born into the world. Owners reported that more than half of the litters born to their dogs and cats were unintentional.

Other interesting findings from the study are that people earning $55,000 or more per year are more likely to adopt from shelters, and southerners and the under-35 set are the least likely to sterilize their pets.

"We hope that by providing this data to others who share our passion for saving the lives of homeless pets, we can break down the barriers to pet adoption and spay/neuter that survey respondents identified," said Susana Della Maddalena, executive director of non-profit PetSmart Charities, Inc. "We can all use the data to develop new practices and messages based on what we now know to be key motivators and barriers."

Every year, six to eight million unwanted cats and dogs enter shelters in the U.S., and three to four million are euthanized according to the animal welfare organization Found Animals.

Now American billionaire Gary Michelson -- a surgeon who has invented hundreds of patented medical devices and procedures -- has decided to tackle the problem with $75 million of his own cash!

Through the organization he created, Found Animals, Michelson is offering $50 million in research grants to scientists with promising approaches for inexpensive, one-dose, surgery-free methods of sterilizing cats and dogs. The first team to succeed in creating a sterilant that works in both dogs and cats, male and female, will walk away with $25 million in prize money, Shirley Johnston, director of scientific research for Found Animals, tells Paw Nation.

Why the need for non-surgical sterilization? Spaying and neutering is important, but the procedures alone can't solve the huge animal overpopulation problem. Surgical sterilization is expensive and it requires access to anesthesia and proper veterinary facilities. That's not practical in many rural areas of the U.S., let alone in the developing world.

"China may have 150 million dogs, and very few are sterilized. India has 30 million street dogs," Andrew Rowan, chief scientific officer of the Human Society of the United States [HSUS], tells Paw Nation. "In places like India and Africa, there's an active rabies problem; in India, for example, there are 20,000 [human] deaths to rabies every year."

In addition to human health impacts and the tax burden of keeping stray animals in check, animals themselves suffer from overpopulation. Rowan estimates that as many as one to two million of the cats and dogs euthanized in the U.S. each year are healthy and adoptable. And around the world, millions of nuisance strays are shot or poisoned, Science magazine reports.

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