Oct 5, 2022 3 min read

When I was a little girl and a stray cat came into our yard, my mother never said, “Love that cat.” She didn’t need to. The moment I saw a helpless, hungry, thirsty, abandoned life, my heart melted. My first reaction was that I wanted to save the cat. I wanted to feed it, love it, and help it because love came easy. Maybe because my walk to greet the cat was uninterrupted by adult words or actions telling me how or why I shouldn’t bother with another life in need, most especially a wild one.

I was careful. I knew what “wild” meant. Possible diseases. And there was getting attached. Cats were dropped off all the time. When I was young I never really listened to adults when it came to animals. I was a little mom in a way, wanting to nurture not just the animal but the necessary natural emotion inside me (maybe because I somehow knew I’d need more of it in an unkind world where love sometimes takes the backseat and hate is the driver). Love is health, I learned over the years. It is also free and infectious. It flows naturally like a river through an unguarded heart. And no matter how much we have of it, we will always want and need more love. Sometimes when we give it out without receiving it, the storage unit inside of us feels like it will never fill up again. But it does.

Since I was small, the cat population has soared, with tens of thousands that are homeless and living in the woods or streets now with no shelter or food, and a high chance of getting a communicable disease or being hit by a car. And every year hundreds of thousands are euthanized in the United States because they never find homes. We didn’t get this having-a-pet thing right. We got it wrong. ALL wrong.

It is not a myth that there is an overpopulation of unwanted pets in the area. Female cats come into heat every year around February to October, which explains why abandoned kittens are being found now in store parking lots after dark. Dogs are occasionally abandoned, but cats seem to be the most abandoned pets.

To reduce unwanted pets please, oh, please, spay and neuter your animals. It is a critical part, and the most humane way, of controlling a problem that, if not addressed, leads to homeless animals that suffer. There are local places that offer low-cost spay and neuter surgeries.

A quote by philosopher and professor Jeremy Bentham in 1789 always comes to mind when I think about abandoned animals: “The question is not, can they reason? Nor can they talk? But can they suffer?” Yes, they can suffer. They are, after all, sentient beings like us, able to perceive or feel things, including pain that comes with starvation, disease, and hot or cold temperatures.

Lisa Scherer

Marianna