Breeding & Homeless Cats

SARSENSTONE CATTERY
Responsible Breeding & the Homeless Pet Problem

Meet the non-pedigreed member of our
family, Tesla of Sarsenstone. Her feral
mother died, but Tesla was rescued,
and came to live with us.

Homeless cats and dogs in the United States are less common than they used to be. That's right; they are less common. Statistics gathered from shelters all over the country have shown a 75% decrease in the number of pets needing to be euthanized compared to a decade or two ago. That remarkable and wonderful decrease has occurred because more and more people, both private pet owners and public servants, have become aware of the need to do spay/neuter, use tags and other methods to identify pets, educate new pet owners about how to train their pets to prevent future problems, and develop new laws and programs that allow senior citizens and others to keep their pets with them if they must move into an apartment or group home.
Nonetheless, homeless pets are still far more common than animal lovers would like them to be, with millions euthanized in shelters all over the country every year and many more roaming city streets unclaimed. Many that are not euthanized succumb to disease, injuries, accidents, and malnutrition. The average age at death for homeless pets is something like five years old. And often they give birth to more homeless puppies and kittens before they die, repeating the cycle.

Breeders are frequently accused of contributing to this tragedy. Laws have recently been passed in a number of cities that sharply limit and all but legally abolish responsible breeding programs. Some animal rights activists say that all breeding should cease forever. Ultimately, they say, humans should not own pets, that our domestic cats and dogs should live out their lives happily in the wild as their ancestors did. Other animal rights activists say that humans may keep their furred companions but that breeders should "go on a breeding diet" until the homeless animal problem is solved.

Those activists fail to recognize that purebred cats are only a very small percentage of all living domestic cats, and moreover that the percentage of pedigreed pets bought from breeders that are later turned in to shelters is far lower than the percentage of pets turned in that were originally obtained from most other sources. For example, research statistics show that the average person is more likely to abandon a pet adopted from a shelter or given to him by a friend than he is to abandon a pet he bought from a breeder.

Animal rights activists also ignore the fact that the survival of the world's historic breeds depends on the constant efforts of what is actually a very small number of breeders and their animals. Breed populations are always quite small. Catastrophes that have interfered with breeding for just a few years, such as the world wars, have caused the extinctions of numerous breeds and threatened the genetic health of many more. Female cats begin breeding at roughly age one year, and are only breedable for about seven years—and that is only assuming that they are bred regularly. If not bred regularly, many of them develop serious uterine infections or reproductive cysts and must be spayed. Curtailing breeding programs more than they are already voluntarily curtailed by most breeders causes severe and permanent reductions in the numbers of unrelated cats in each breed.

Asking breeders to stop breeding completely "until the homeless pet problem is solved" is like asking people not to have any human children until the problems of high birth rates, poverty, war, disease, and famine are solved all over the human world. Solving social problems takes time and intelligence. Some actions cause more harm than good. Punitive laws divide communities instead of promoting cooperation, drive people underground instead of encouraging them to seek help.

It makes little sense to stop good parents from rearing bright, healthy, well loved children. Those parents are not the cause of the world's social problems. On the contrary, it can be argued that they and their children are necessary to solve the world's problems. We don't need for the world's human population to shrink. We only need it to stop expanding so that we can meet every human being's needs properly and avoid destroying more of the world's ecosystem. As research on human overpopulation has shown, if you can educate people in poor countries and improve the living conditions, the people tend to get control over their lives and reduce their birth rates to where the population stops expanding. People whose lives are in control reduce birth rates by their own choice. Not only that but they improve the quality of the care they give to the children they do have.

The homeless pet problem is very similar. It isn't right or effective to try to stop every possible kitten or puppy from being born. As has been shown by the San Francisco SPCA and other successful programs, reducing the number of homeless pets is best done by educating and providing resources for low income pet owners. Research shows that it is primarily in low income areas where pet owners have the most trouble getting pets neutered, trained, and tagged. It is also in low income communities that one is most likely to find dogs such as pit bulls bred exclusively for profit as fighting dogs, guards dogs for drug houses, and so forth. If we help low income pet owners to learn more about responsible pet ownership, find resources to properly care for their pet, even help them when we can with their other life problems, then we can expect a positive response.

It makes no sense to cast shame on good breeders, pass punitive laws that restrict and regulate and drive underground those who might otherwise seek to improve the quality of breeding of the world's historic breeds.

It is true that there are individual "bad egg" breeders who breed too many animals and fail to screen or educate the buyers of those animals. Likewise, there are bad shelters whose operators collect too many animals and fail to provide proper care for them. Such shelters become hell-holes for the very animals they were supposed to "rescue," and other shelters public and private must then step in to rescue the animals once again.

But this author believes that the bulk of pedigreed cat and dog breeders, like the bulk of people operating rescue groups and shelters, work unselfishly and by and large do a decent job. For the most part, we all keep learning to do better by the animals, and the statistics show that resuers and breeders alike are all doing a better job than they did thirty years ago.

Breeders of pedigreed cats as a group are not the cause of the homeless pet problem. Nevertheless, responsible cat breeders do owe it to their cats, themselves, and to their community to ensure that they individually do not contribute to the numbers of homeless animals. For many years, breeders have required buyers to sign a legally binding agreement to neuter their kittens prior to puberty. Most of those breeders have been strict about following up to make sure the buyers did in fact neuter the kittens on time as promised. Many have taken buyers to court to enforce the spay/neuter clauses in their contracts. But at Sarsenstone we feel that by far the best way to ensure that we will never contribute to the homeless cat problem is to spay and neuter all of our kittens before they go to their new homes. That is what the ASPCA and the American Veterinary Medical Association have recommended for years now, and that is what we do.**

We know that none of our babies will ever have an accidental litter, we can usually get the surgery done at a group rate for less than our clients individually could, with a vet we know is skilled, and our clients have nothing to do except sit back and enjoy the kitten as the kitten grows up.

Early neuter is not the whole story, however. We carefully screen all potential owners of our kittens to make sure they have reasonable expectations of cats and of the breed. We make sure they will be able to provide love and high quality care for the full 15 to 20 years the cat is likely to live. And we pay attention to pet identification and training, the other two cornerstones of preventing pet homelessness. We encourage new owners to use collars and tags, or preferably a form of permanent identification of their pets. We also make sure our kittens are trained to use the scratching post, the litter box, and we follow up with the new owners to make sure that any problems that may arise are quickly nipped in the bud. We are always available to answer questions and provide help. We want our kittens and their new owners to live happily ever after.

For more information, see:

Homeless cats and the pedigreed cat fancy

National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy

National Animal Interest Alliance
*****

Postscript

The article above was written in the late 1990s. Our rescued tabby, Tesla, died of lymphoma (cancer) in 2004. She was ten years old and had lived with us from the age of 8 weeks. Tesla outlived her feral mother and her brother Clyde. She is survived by her sister Bonnie, who lives with my sister, and by her best friend Mournie-Na-Mair, a little Siamese who still lives with us. After Tesla's death, Mournie looked for Tesla every day and frequently howled. This went on for many weeks. We knew how she felt.

**The ASPCA and AVMA began recommending spay and neuter of kittens 8-16 weeks old after a major research study demonstrated that early spay/neuter does not have any adverse health effects on young kittens. Early neutering was the norm for male cats for most of the last 100 years - and has been the norm for horses and cattle for even longer. Female cats have been followed by researchers for more than fifteen years now without any indication of adverse effects. Kittens neutered early grow a little larger than those neutered late and so if anything they are less likely to develop urinary tract disease than late neutered kittens. In addition, spaying females young virtually eliminates the risk of breast cancer, whereas late spayed females still have some risk of developing breast cancer.

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