You’ve probably heard the message, maybe more than once. “Help control the pet population, spay and neuter your pets.”
But do you know that doing so can help save millions of cats and dogs from suffering AND also prolong your own beloved pet’s life?
Spay and Neuter Means More Time With Your Pets
You can have a lot more years with your kitties. Here are the facts:
→Neutered (male) cats live 62% longer than unneutered males
→Spayed (female) cats live 39% longer than unspayed females.
Those improved lifespans are due to the reality that spaying and neutering reduce or eliminate a wide variety of feline health risks.
- Reduces/eliminates the risk of developing many cancers
- Reduces/eliminates the risk of female cats developing reproductive organ infections (pyometra) or tumors
- Reduces the stress of female heat cycles and the stress/malnutrition of pregnancies
- Reduces the risk of contracting deadly disease/injury from fighting and/or roaming
Cats don’t have a psychological desire to have kittens, they have hormones that drive them to reproduce even as young as four or five months old—when they’re still kittens themselves. Females can become pregnant while nursing kittens, and they can average three litters a year, with four to six kittens per litter. That’s as many as 18 kittens per female cat each year. That’s also a tremendous amount of stress on her, as well as a lot of kittens being born that need homes.
“Fixing” the Pet Overpopulation Problem
The United States and other countries around the world are experiencing a massive cat (and dog) overpopulation problem. Because felines are so good at producing so many offspring so frequently, the problem grows exponentially.
Here’s the math. 2 unfixed cats =
- 20,736 cats in 4 years
- 420,000 cats in 7 years
Do you know 20,000 people who want a cat? How about 400,000? Sadly, either do we.
Tens of thousands of rescue organizations (official and unofficial) scramble every year to save and adopt out as many cats and kittens as possible. But the numbers are against us. The National Kitten Coalition reports that 3.4 million cats enter U.S. shelters every year and 1.4 million of them are euthanized.
That number doesn’t even include all of the kittens born each year that don’t make it to shelters. It’s estimated that only one in four (25%) of kittens born outside survives past six months of age, which means 75% of them, or more, suffer through illness or injury.
Rescue organizations do their best, but we can’t solve the overpopulation problem solely through adoption. We must address the root cause: too many unspayed females and unneutered males.
The Bottom Line
Together, we can save millions of cats from pain and suffering and we can prolong the lives of your loved ones. All it takes is spaying and neutering as many pets as possible.