neuter.

mathias-erhart, Flickr 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 ...

Flickr/helorits Miller 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 ...

Six to eight million dogs and cats end up in U.S. shelters every year. Photo: Jennifer Leigh/Flickr 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 ...