It's Tortie Tuesday, the weekly excuse for people who live with three-colored cats to be unbearably cute and whimsical. I considered doing this post as an "animal interview" but realized that my cats wouldn't have access to information about the question: Is it still true that "there aren't enough homes for them all" and that "neuter and spay is the only way" to keep animals responsibly?
This post is, of course, brought to you by some of America's most photogenic animals who do currently need homes. In the past I used to describe the picture picks as "the cutest," but that's obviously not accurate. Even at Petfinder pages where many or most of the pictures come out badly, you know the animals are cute. These are merely the animals for whom Petfinder was displaying the cutest pictures this morning. If you went to an old-style shelter and met forty animals all in one place, for all I know you might think thirty-nine of those animals were more appealing, in real life, than the one featured here.
There aren't enough pet blogs that use Petfinder links for them all, Gentle Readers.
Anyway, we've not considered collie dogs for a while, so let's look at photogenic collies:
1. Sophie from Texas, but Listed in New York
Right. People don't spay large female dogs because of concerns about overpopulation; they spay large female dogs in order to be able to live with their pets. We all know what the technical term for a female dog is, and how it got to be a term of abuse for a female of any species who is whiny, snappy, no fun for anyone to be around, and/or actively throwing her body in the direction of any available male. If you don't have a female dog spayed, that is what you have to live with every few weeks. Two unaltered female dogs won't usually kill each other but can do quite a lot of damage to the house where they meet and anyone who gets in their way. So there's a need for proof that this 15-pound pup, soon to be a large dog, has been spayed...because, even though she's obviously not a show-quality example of any breed, there's a serious concern that people are going to want to use this dog for commercial breeding?
Yoicks. (That's what Scooby-Doo would have said. We may feature Great Danes in another post.)
Anyway Sophie has obviously suffered enough and deserves the best of homes. Though I've known 15-year-olds who had the experience and character to care for a peg-legged puppy, and I can think of some middle-aged men who are about loathsome enough to torture a peg-legged puppy.
2. Monty from Chantilly, Virginia
Reportedly this classic collie was found straying along a country road, with his coat looking messy, which any long-haired dog can accomplish in minutes, and infested with fleas, which suggested a real need to be rescued. People who love dogs with gorgeous fluffy coats ought to be able to spend part of every warm day on the back porch, going over those coats with fine-toothed combs. Sometimes people lose or abandon shaggy dogs, in summers like this one, just because the flea problem seems so overwhelming. The vet may recommend a product. The product is not cheap and may not be healthy to handle, and a large dog takes such a lot of it. You picture the dog needing this treatment every week for the rest of its life, and up out of the shadowy depths of your mind comes a little voice whispering, "We could just take him along for a drive in the country, take him out in a meadow somewhere, and then everyone sprint back to the car and drive away..." When a dog looks gorgeous, scares away evildoers and a large percentage of Jehovah's Witnesses, always hangs out with you and acts as if it thought you were the greatest human of all time, really wants to make itself useful herding sheep or puppies or something, and just might save someone from drowning some day, the right sort of human will of course ignore this temptation. Once you can bear to be close to the dog again, sitting on the back porch, grooming the dog with a flea comb, is an excellent way to relax.
Monty is thought to be about three years old, still able to learn better manners if trained. Currently he's shy until he's decided a place is his to manage, then loud and ebullient. They say he calms down quickly if people greet him, though. During the hot, damp, flea-friendly weather that's not completely over yet, he's avoided snuggling, though he likes a little petting, and spent most of his time near the air conditioner. Could he be blamed?
The adoption fee for this handsome fellow is $450. Unlike the New York shelter that somehow got custody of Sophie, however, Monty's current legal guardians say the $450 covers basic veterinary care, not only the emergency kind, and he's already been neutered.
3. Kyler from Cumming
The control-freak writing of his web page, https://www.petfinder.com/dog/kyler-56662538/ga/cumming/hero-dog-rescue-ga876/ , sets my teeth on edge, but have you ever seen a more photogenic collie? There aren't a lot of homeless collies around Atlanta; there aren't even very many classic rat terriers that somebody claims have a collie ancestor somewhere.
But it's worth checking out the web page for an example of what keeps dogs from being adopted. They want you to fill out a form basically confiding your entire life history in strangers, and then, if they feel like it, they'll tell you what they know about the dog's history and personality? All they'll condescend to tell you, up front, is that Kyler doesn't get along well with cats?
Seriously, what often happens with "foster care" for animals is that people who don't want to pay the adoption fee or accept full responsibility for the animals do want to keep them. Somehow I suspect this is the way things are for Kyler. He may already have a home. Sort of.
In a world where dogs as adorable-looking as these can wind up in shelters, shouldn't we all be thinking of pet overpopulation as a serious problem?
Where I live, the answer is a qualified no. Where you live, the situation may be different. Because dogs and cats can go through a full generation in one year, it doesn't take long for this situation to flip: Just a few unaltered animals can, under favorable conditions, generate a local pet overpopulation problem in just a few years; or, conversely, the "confine and sterilize all the pets" zealots can generate a local pet under-population problem in just a few years. And, because people look for their missing pets locally, the problem can't just be solved by shipping all the straying pets in e.g. Nebraska to Virginia.
I dutifully took all the Cat Sanctuary cats in for spaying and neutering in the 1990s. By the time Mackerel was found in an alley, though, I'd learned that social cats are rare and special, and Mac and his family were social cats. So, other cats have come and gone at the Cat Sanctuary, over the years since Mac moved in. And, as regular readers may have noticed, I've not blogged about them. There is a reason for this.
I've mentioned two cats who stayed here and made themselves unwelcome. One was so thoroughly undesirable that I resolved to put it in a shelter. I zipped it into a big duffel bag and started walking toward the state line, so that it could be reported as a nuisance in Tennessee. And I had gone just about a mile when someone stopped, guessed that a cat was in the bag, and gave me forty dollars for that cat. And I was so close to hating that cat, and I said so, that the only evidence I needed to release that cat into that person's care was the out-of-state license plate.
I've mentioned two cats who definitely didn't want to stay with me. They were the last few that a former cat rescuer was willing to relocate before going into hospice care with cancer. They were social cats, and wanted their own home and family. Schatzi, the bright young thing, made it back to her original home and lived there for a few more years. Suzie, the old Queen Cat, was caught on the way homeward and adopted on the spot.
I've even mentioned a couple of cats who never saw the Cat Sanctuary, at this site. I mentioned them in terms of problems. They did not have to move in here.
The fact is, when a cat has spent a night here while seeking a permanent home, if it was a normal lovable cat it's found a home within 48 hours. Well, there was Sisawat, who was born on my porch looking like a classic Siamese and of course grew up to look out of spec even for a Russian Blue, though she was a pretty cat. Sisawat was available for adoption, but she stayed with me until she was two years old. I never said she was in need of adoption. Sisawat was not my pet, because her mother was. Still, she was a very nice kitten, welcome to stay until she decided she wanted to be someone else's pet. Like Kyler-dog, above, Sisawat had a home all along. I didn't try to scare off potential adopters with demands for information nobody should ever transfer through the Internet, but I did wait for Sisawat to make it clear that she'd chosen a human of her own.
The fact is, in the absence of glaring medical or behavioral problems, in my part of the world a cat can generally find a home. A dog, too. Petfinder's line-up of dogs small enough to take over Cocoa's job, for instance, is a gallery of culls. Most of the dogs on the "under 25 pounds" page are puppies. All of the genuinely small adult dogs' web pages make it clear that they were rejected for good and sufficient reasons. All of the really adoptable dogs are the ones whose humans sadly decided the dogs were too big, or the humans were too old, or both. We do have homeless animals but neither the overall number of homeless animals, nor their individual profiles, will support a claim that they become homeless due to "overpopulation." They become homeless due to human mortality, behavior problems both human and animal, and people admiring the qualities of bigger dogs than they can keep.
If the goal is to reduce the number of these animals who are euthanized in shelters, the way to do that would be to facilitate adoptions. People who ask me for kittens say "I've not gone to the shelters. I'm not going to give them all that information--who knows where it might get to. They'd probably say I'm too old, or the children are too young, or I don't make enough money. I'm not going to pay a hundred dollars for a cat, or five hundred for a dog, when it doesn't even have a pedigree." In Kingsport they might add, "Don't you remember when the shelter 'volunteer' stole that little boy's dog and demanded $400 for it? Didn't X ever tell you about the cat that was stolen out of his yard and 'adopted' on the other side of town? I don't support that shelter!" and if the shelter staff would admit and address that issue, it would be better for the innocent animals. I'm not so concerned about the animals whose ex-owners put them in shelters because they've attacked other pets or humans. However, less data collecting, more trust, and lower fees would match homeless pets with petless homes much more efficiently. Shelter staff need to face the fact that they can't guarantee every animal a perfect home, but at least most of the animals who deserve good homes would find them if adoption fees were capped at $25 and data about adopters was limited to a police record check, after which the paper with the adopters' names on it was destroyed and what was entered in the computer was "Adopted by resident of [town] after police record check."
Some people specifically want unaltered pets, also, because domestic animal species are visibly threatened. This is a temporary effect, likely to correct itself, since these people will notice when local cat and dog populations return to healthy levels.
Does this mean that everyone in Virginia should be raising kittens for profit? By no means. I said nothing about profit. Nobody's paying enough for kittens to cover the cost of feeding them until they're six months old, which is when they should normally be placed. To discourage the wrong sort of people it's often recommended that you should say there's an adoption fee for kittens. I do say that to yuppie types, but in conversations with seniors and young parents who need cats, the adoption fee tends to be forgotten during the discussion of how they can return the cats if necessary. If our concern is about the animals we need to keep the focus on compatibility, and keep money out of the picture. My cat Samantha unmistakably refused to be sold but consented to come home with me. If more animals heard human speech as words, and had observed other residents of their home being sold during the day, we would probably see more of this behavior. Animals are more likely to accept new places and people when their feelings in the matter are considered. One reason for keeping adoption fees low is to discourage the whole idea of selling animals as distinct from helping them find good homes.
The reason for spay-and-neuter campaigns is that so many humans don't want to keep their pets' offspring and don't know anyone who will. I don't agree with Roger Caras, bless his English heart, that the future of domestic animal species should be in the hands of commercial breeders, or that only overpriced snob-appeal animals should survive. I think people who live with and care about animals are the best qualified to make decisions about whether or not to interfere with those animals' reproductive behavior. Do you and your friends really want to preserve Fluffy's DNA, enough to offer loving homes to Fluffy's offspring, even the ones who look like their other parent? How badly does your world need more Fluffy-ness? If the truth is that there's nothing irreplaceable about Fluffy, that you could replace Fluffy's contribution to your family at any animal shelter, then planning to replace Fluffy's contribution at an animal shelter is probably what you should do. There will always be homeless animals, because some humans will become disabled or die unexpectedly. Adopting homeless animals is more kind than producing unwanted animals. At the same time the question must be asked by whom animals are unwanted. If the answer is "By snobs who think expensive animals are 'better' than ordinary ones, by people who don't like the species, and by people with an agenda to build slums and herd people into them, but not by the people I actually know," then concerns about preserving the species from the commercial breeders may take a higher priority than concerns about animals being unwanted.
There's a lot to be said for an animal family becoming part of a human family. The animals we love don't live as long as we do. The loss of a beloved pet does not always open everyone's heart to the idea of adopting a completely new, probably less satisfactory animal. I know firsthand that even another social cat who doesn't listen to words seems like a shabby substitute for a social cat who did listen to words. If the thought that one day Nero will grow old and die makes "A puppy--any old puppy--to take the place of Nero!" (complete with throwing the letter offering a new puppy on the floor and stamping on it) seem reasonable to you, then Nero's puppy may be important, if only as a placeholder who maintains the habits of pet care in your family.
"But the animals reproduce so much faster than humans do." Do they? In a world where anyone takes seriously the idea of a "right to spray" chemical poisons outdoors, a better argument against letting pets reproduce naturally would be "But so many kittens and puppies don't survive." I know that in some people's minds, when my ex-alley kitten Mackerel and his sister Polly reached puberty (about the same time), they "should" have produced eight kittens that year, who would then have joined them in producing forty kittens the next year, and so on. In reality, for a start, my social cat family don't seem capable of inbreeding. Mac was not the father of Polly's kittens. And she had only four viable kittens that year. Neither Polly nor her kittens produced any viable offspring the next year. Steelgray sired one litter before being neutered. Mogwai gave birth to more than two kittens, but only two lived to maturity; they didn't live long or have viable offspring. Grayzel lost two litters and then, in subsequent years, seemed to use pennyroyal to prevent or terminate pregnancy; she was neither confined nor sterilized but she didn't have any more kittens. Bisquit, who seemed gender-confused until she was two years old, was the one of Polly's kittens who produced a line of descent.
When blood tests were done for subsequent generations of this cat family, they were FIV-positive. FIV normally spreads only from mother cats to kittens, so it seems likely in hindsight that Patchnose, the sickly little mother of Mac and Polly, had the disease. That would explain why, though they were fed and vetted and loved, only one cat in the female line of descent from Patchnose lived long enough to show signs of aging. It may also explain why, so far as I know, all the living members of the family are male-line descendants. Between obvious glyphosate poisoning and suspected-in-hindsight FIV, in any case, relative to their lifespan, my social cat family have reproduced less prolifically than humans do.
Over the years it seems as if every year somebody or other, sometimes a fellow animal rescuer, feels called to scold me for allowing cats to reproduce. None of them seems even to have thought about the possibility that my cats had FIV; all of them seemed to be just parroting a speech they'd been taught and looking around for the teacher to give them a little star. The speech is remarkable for its lack of logic. "When cats are allowed to reproduce naturally they diiie, and they reproduce so fast you'll be neck-deeeep in kittens!" Which? Overpopulation is a serious health concern for all species but the Humane Cat Genocide Society's propaganda sounds so ridiculous coming out of these people. I say sweetly, "If and when we are overcrowded I'll start neutering." Has not happened.
Some people, including the sort of nice, likable, more or less "conservative" middle-aged people who read my content at writing sites, don't want to believe in overpopulation. "But where I live, in South Dakota, the population is sparse, the small towns are dying, we could use more people," they say, sincerely, and credibly. And, for those concerned about the prospects for humankind, horribly.
Yes, a few places are still very sparsely populated, because their ecology would not support a dense human population. Too many other places are packed with stupid people who see that nobody has enough room to live decently, nobody is well nourished, lots of people are dying of plagues in the slums, and their stupid reaction is "If two out of every three babies is dying, let's try to have six babies!" Then increased crowding increases the death rate and the stupid people react with "If three out of every four babies is dying, we should try to have eight!"
Wrong. If you live in one of those remote places that aren't destined to become big cities, like some correspondents in the Dakotas, in Idaho, in Saskatchewan, you may not feel that there are too many humans in this world. You might even have a primal (stupid) reaction that, if there are too many humans, the problem is that not enough of them look like you; the majority of humans, worldwide, are or look Chinese.
Someone who sounds Jewish even published, recently, a lament for the babies people are choosing not to have. I cry foul. If we believe that God has a plan for humankind, surely we believe that that plan makes provision for the babies people don't have this year. Some other year they'll be born and it will all work out for the best. If people aren't happy with their children's decisions not to have babies they could at least write honest laments for the grandparents they're not getting a chance to be.
And let me say here that I am totally in favor of giving older people the opportunity to be grandparents. There are homeless human babies, languishing in shelters, just as there are homeless animals. Adopt, don't flop--especially if you're "Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color," since BIPOC babies are a disproportionate share of homeless babies, and social workers think they need to be adopted by people of the same ethnic type.
But seriously. We all live in a world where the total population is getting what the sociological experts say will be the point of sustainability. Sociological experts can be wrong, and their efforts to talk about human behavior as if it were a settled science always sound so pompous that people enjoy when they're wrong, but the real world does seem to be reaching a crisis point. People are living in slums. People are growing up sterile, growing up averse to parenthood, growing up homosexual or gender-confused. There aren't enough jobs for people who want to work. People can't afford even to make payments on decent homes during their child-rearing years. People are living without cats, which still inevitably means living with rats and fleas, because of policies enforced on those ghastly stack-and-pack warehouses in which we expect the young to give my generation grandchildren. Can it be a surprise that so many young people are making the decent choice to have one child or none? In all places where humans want to live, there are too many humans.
Nature is frantically trying to slow down the human birth rate without resorting to plagues or cannibalism, which are what happen next if individual non-reproduction doesn't relieve crowded animal populations. Appeals to young people to breed more of their allegedly special genes are doomed until we can get the human population down to a point where everyone can have comfortable agrarian, sustainable, Green lives. If my generation want to be grandparents, we need to be thinking in terms of adopting children whose parents have been murdered in the slums. Getting the most promising children out of the slums may increase the chances of survival for the ones left behind.
Human overpopulation underlies some of the mindless "neuter and spay is the only way" parrot-babble, too. "Even if there are homes for a few more animals, with so many more humans, they're sure to crowd out and displace wild animals!" Actually I don't believe the real world supports that. It may be that my sustainable Green home is preventing me from seeing what's going on in the unsustainable cities, just as the people in South Dakota aren't seeing human overpopulation. I have, this year, four social cats. Almost every time I linger in the yard with them I hear the whir of hummingbirds. The cardinals have their new coats by now and are back on mosquito-catching duty, as are the House Wrens. We have another skunk, warier than Pepe and Hepzibah, who used to let me see them from a distance every few years. I'm procrastinating, not wanting to trap the raccoon I've heard chittering at night. If I walk up into the woods I'm almost sure to startle rabbits, if not deer. Both deer and bears have been seen walking down the streets in my town. If I'm out with the cats around sundown I'm likely to see the possum, a nondescript generic-looking possum this year, not big Dorsa with the dorsal stripe who let little Silver slap (her? him?) to show me how tame Dorsa was. I see no danger of the cats displacing wildlife.
Urban sprawl, with people who don't know how to live in the country moving outward, and the miseducation of farmers, are likely to endanger wildlife. But keeping city neighborhoods catless so they'll be vulnerable to rat-borne plagues seems a very ghoulish approach to those real problems. It would be far better for humans to recognize that we are the overpopulated species.
The easiest way to address that problem (it seems to have worked for Ireland) is to build a social culture that encourages people to get married and do what might make babies around age 30 or 35. The Irish do this by emphasizing the need for young people to own decent homes before they can consider marriage and babies. What else they may do with their energy, besides working and saving money, is none of older people's business so long as they're not making babies. The whole campaign has been "natural" and acceptable even to Catholics, and it's worked for them much better than the American approach of "Why expect young people to control themselves when it's so profitable to sell them 'birth control' gadgets?" has done.
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