Re: “SA needs national legislation to regulate and set standards for animal pounds,” (The Herald, April 24).
Needlessly suffering animals are worthy of human sadness and action.
Where I live, there’s a particular need for consistently publicly funded trap/neuter/release (TNR) programmes to keep stray or feral cat populations from exploding and therefore greatly suffering.
But that seems to not be a very politically popular option with the always vocal taxpayer complaints organisations.
Meanwhile, the city (Surrey, British Columbia) neighbouring mine, as but one shamefully serious example, allowed an estimated 36,000 stray/feral cats to fester, very many of which suffer severe malnourishment, debilitating injury, illness and/or infection.
That number was about six years ago. I was informed four years later by the local cat charity that, if anything, their “numbers would have increased, not decreased” since then.
The city’s municipal government as well as too many uncaring residents did little or nothing to help the local cat charity’s TNR programme, which has ceased functioning.
And then leave it to classically cruel human hypocrisy to despise and even shoot or poison those same suffering cats for naturally feeding on smaller prey while municipal governments and many residents largely permit the stray/feral cat populations to explode — along with the resultant feline privation within.
What really irritates me are the taxpayer groups that want it both ways: to not have these cats killing smaller wildlife, notably birds, however much it’s out of survival necessity, and to also not have tax-dollar revenue going towards consistent publicly funded TNR programmes to keep those cat populations from exploding.
With such TNR programmes fully functioning, those cat numbers should gradually diminish.
Another notable problem are the deadbeat cat owners who cruelly deliberately abandon their felines.
Some owners decide to move and leave their cats behind, sometimes dropping the pets off in local woods to fend for themselves.
The bitter irony is that these cats breed and multiply in the wild, probably exponentially, becoming generation after generation of stray/feral cats left to suffer while killing wildlife for sustenance.
Frank Sterle Jr, Canada
