Vaccination is great.
But why sterilization is?
Because pets and stray pets are an ecological disaster, especially if they freely reproduce in the wild. It’s fine if you keep them at home, but not if you let them roam free. cats will kill anything they come across just for fun. entire species and ecosystems have been wiped out because of this.
Our neighbor had freely reproducing barn cats that he didn’t care about at all, so you’d have sickly cats all over the neighborhood, regularly finding dead ones. It isn’t fun for them either. It’s best for everyone involved to leave their reproduction to breeders.
Breeders are horrible. Get them from a shelter. When the shelters are empty we can talk about breeding.
Right but this is in the context of Bhutan, which has just achieved 100% sterilization.
Shelters will become very niche there, very quickly. Most of my local shelter’s cats are kittens, given up because a cat wasn’t sterilized. Give it a year, maximum, local shelters will close and it’ll be regional shelters full of the oddballs with medical conditions and the like. While shelters will always have a place for rehoming those animals and dealing with the lost-but-not-found, those lost animals that become strays won’t reproduce, and very shortly the only new cats will be from authorized breeders.
It’s the role they should have. Not dealing in pedigrees or exotic cats, but just providing the demand for common cats, because shelters won’t be able to meet demand, in Bhutan. Good for them.
You had me until your last sentence. Breeders aren’t a guarantee that it will be done properly.
Mixed breed or mongrel dogs are sometimes healthier than purebred dogs that are often inbred. Same goes for purebred cat breeds, if they are overbred with close relatives you will get bad genetic issues.
I was right there with you until the last sentence. Why use breeders when there are so many animals in need of a loving home already?
if you sterilize 100% of all pets, where else are you supposed to get them? I’m talking long term in the context of the article. of course you can go the adoption route too. I’m just talking about how they would reproduce.
Valid- I am not meaning to imply 100% should be sterilized like in the article, because there would of course eventually be none left. But breeders are not exactly a bulwark holding off depopulation of our pets, and more often than not contribute to their overpopulation. We couldn’t and shouldn’t use the exact same plan as the article because our conditions are vastly different, but that doesn’t mean that we should only get our pets from breeders either. Of course, people freely breeding animals like in your example of barn cats is also wildly irresponsible. This is not a black and white issue, a solution will require elements from both lines of thought.
… Because as time flows, animals pass away from age, and we dont want our companion species to go extinct?
Breeders aren’t saints. They make money by breeding cats that are in demand, even if that means breeding disfigured cats with (too) short skulls because they look SO cute : /
sure, but those are edge cases. You’re equating the entire profession with their worst representatives. Besides I’m all for outlawing that kind of breeding, because the demand for them won’t disappear.
Which is why there should be a level of regulation around animal breeding, but that doesnt mean all breeders are creating the next pug.
